


Little Devils

by DictionaryWrites, Johannes_Evans



Series: Kuroda Antiques [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Demons, Fae & Fairies, Fae Magic, Fantasy, Gen, Humor, Magical Realism, Original Fiction, Original Mythology, Original Universe, Plot, Scottish Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25000630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johannes_Evans/pseuds/Johannes_Evans
Summary: Velma Kuroda, a student in Art History, finds her side interest in antiques becomes abruptly more central when her aunt decides to hand over her business. That business involves demonic infestations, run-of-the-mill hauntings, and other supernatural occurrences that might require a specialist — Velma has to learn to adapt as quickly as she can.
Relationships: Velma Kuroda & Hamish MacKinnon
Series: Kuroda Antiques [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1737964
Comments: 49
Kudos: 31
Collections: Magic Beholden





	1. Prologue

It was a bright and sunny day when Hamish woke up, but because it was January, the light was somehow anaemic, neutered. It came through the window in a neat square, directly upon his pillow, and he groaned quietly, reaching up and pressing the heels of his hands against his tired eyes. Pressing his face to the pillow did naught at all to drown it out, but he tried anyway, his mouth twisted in a somnolent scowl. One knew from how the light landed that there was no true power in it, no heat, and yet for all that, it seemed so much the brighter.

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes.

He did not usually use an alarm clock. For all his attempts at lies-in, over the years, he had never succeeded in sleeping past nine o’clock in the morning at the very latest, and as it stood, it was a little bit before eight.

Sighing, he pulled himself to the edge of his bed, drawing himself reluctantly from beneath the warmth of his coverlet, blindly putting his feet into his slippers as he reached for his spectacles.

He did not get dressed right away – it was a Monday, and he never opened the shop on Mondays. He had an appointment late in the evening, customising a chair for a gentleman with rather particular tastes, but that was all for the day. He drew his dressing gown down from its neat hook on the back of his bedroom door, pulling it on and belting it shut over his belly.

This had been the dressing gown he had used since Christmas, and yet it felt so incredibly decadent, lined as it was with a plush, black fleece that was ever-so-soft to the touch. Hamish was a gentleman inclined to life’s small pleasures, where they might be found, but this particular dressing gown was beyond, and he allowed himself a moment to huddle in its sleek, black warmth – rather too sleek to suit him, actually, and somewhat at odds with the cheerful yellow flannel of his pyjamas, but what did it matter?

It had been a gift.

One was allowed to enjoy a gift.

He brushed his teeth whilst ignoring the chattering din of the shadows behind him, as he did every morning. He washed his face with a flannel, and combed his blond hair – it was thinner than he would like, although it was a mercy he was not bald as a cue ball, as his father had been once upon a time – back from his face, and then he went downstairs.

The stairs creaked under him as he stepped on each one, grateful for the fleece lining of his slippers to protect him from the hardwood’s cool morning bite, and he moved to put wood on the fireplace that dominated the living room, laying kindling in amongst it and then lighting it with a match.

How many fires had he lit in his lifetime, just like this? Kneeling on the rug with a match in his hand, feeling the sudden heat against his skin before he laid it onto the fire? He stared into the embers as they came to life, licking at the logs before working to devour them.

Behind him, beyond the sleek blackness of his dressing gown, there was a deeper, darker blackness, and try as it might, the morning light could make no penetration of it. He felt the eldritch weight of that blackness behind him, looming over his shoulders, and heard the soft, chittering whispers of the horde at the very edge of his hearing.

It was an inhuman sound, insectile in its multitude, and insectile, too, in the way it buzzed and hummed, subsumed by a vibratory note that one would never hear in a voice from something… natural.

The horde grew louder, louder, until it sounded like rolling thunder in Hamish’s ears, the noise of it all running down his spine like the accompanying lightning strike. Sighing, he sat back upon his heels, his palms against his knees.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he said, finally, and the horde was abruptly as silent as anything, anticipatory, _hungry_ , for what he would say next. “Time for breakfast.”

The darkness became a hundred smaller, rushing shadows as the horde rushed toward the kitchen, cackling and laughing and falling over themselves, and smiling ruefully – fondly, goodness, how fond he was – to himself, feeling the tired ache in his knees, Hamish pulled himself back to his feet, and made to turn on the stove, as he did every morning.

The horde waited impatiently for its customary breakfast of bacon and eggs.


	2. Chapter One

Velma’s chin rested on the back of her hands, which were folded on the surface of the kitchen counter. Beside her, asleep in his basket on top of one of the kitchen stools, was Snowdrop, the flat-faced British Longhair that her brother, Kaito, had taken to walking on a lead around the area in the evenings. Snowdrop’s basket was apparently here because he liked to be involved in kitchen activity, but he didn’t seem very involved to Velma: the cat was flat on his back with his mouth was wide open, his eyes tightly closed, and now and again his tail would twitch.

It was not yet ten o’clock, but she had no seminars to get to today, and she was allowing herself the rest of the day off before she went home to work on her Klimt essay. Kaito had already gone to school, and Yuuko, her mother, was at work.

She’d been sat down for a few minutes now, and it was already grating at her: this morning, she’d already changed the filter on the extractor fan in the kitchen, put together the new flatpack desk Kaito hadn’t yet had time to set up, and mowed the lawn. She wanted to go and comb the antique shops around Nottingham before she headed home, but half of them didn’t even open until eleven, and the idleness was making her twitch.

“Have you been talking to Aunt Ginchiyo, recently?” Daisuke asked, and Velma shook her head, reaching across to scratch Snowdrop’s face, her thumb scratching at his ear as he shoved his cheek into her palm.

“Not really,” Velma said. “I’ve been focusing on assignments for my seminars, and I’ve just finished two big essays, one more on Klimt is due in soon. Between uni, karate, and work, I haven’t been talking to anybody much. Haven’t had a day off in months, actually. I don’t think I’m accustomed to it.”

“And the work?” Daisuke prompted.

“Haven’t had any specialist jobs,” Velma said. “I’ve mostly been shifting Observers and Ladybird books recently, and I picked up a box of pristine Rupert annuals from the fifties the week before last.”

“What, _no_ antiques?” her father asked, looking stricken.

“Some Dinky toys, but normally when I work with antiques it’s when I come across something for free, Dad, and it’s worth selling on.”

“And _no one’s_ been calling you for more… unique cases?”

“Not since before Christmas,” Velma said, extricating her hand from beneath Snowdrop’s head to drink the last of her hot chocolate, which was very nearly cold. “And that was all little stuff.”

“You need to promote yourself,” Daisuke said sagely, and Velma rolled her eyes, leaning down so that she was nose-to-nose with the now-upright Snowdrop, who looked up at her with sleepy, green eyes and his mouth still open. She’d never known a cat to look so incredibly stupid.

It was funny, she thought, that Daisuke was so intent on her focusing on the antiques work. When she was a lass, growing up in Glasgow, he’d had his own shop, and she’d learned all about the different things they had in stock, the different styles of furniture, but it was Aunt Ginchiyo that had done the _unique_ work, the _specialist_ cases, and she was still going.

The fact was, people that came into genuinely haunted or enchanted objects normally did so on purpose, and were in contact with appropriate authorities on the subject – and most people didn’t want that authority to be twenty-four years old and pursuing an MA in Art History. The jobs that Velma was ordinarily called out to were for the uninitiated, for mundane people who’d stumbled on a magical object and didn’t know how to get rid of it, and needed someone to safely take it off their hands.

“Do you want any errands running before I drive back down to London?” she asked, watching as her father poured more batter into a series of paper cases, expertly twisting his wrist so that he didn’t spill a single drop from one case to the next. She’d been sat still for far too long. “Your guttering looks—”

“Our gutters are _fine_ ,” Daisuke said.

“When was the last time they were cleaned?”

Daisuke was quiet, and Velma could see his expression in the reflection of the window, apparently trying to think of what the correct answer was.

“Dad, they’re meant to be done twice a year.”

“I know that!”

“I’ll do them.”

“No, no, Velma, there’s no ladder, and I don’t want you all the way up there, anyway. I can do it.”

“You’re terrified of heights.”

“We’ll hire a man!”

“Do not _hire a man_ , it takes twenty minutes and a—”

Her phone was vibrating, and she picked it up, frowning at the unknown number. It was a house phone, with a Nottingham area code, but she didn’t recognise it, and she glanced at her father, who looked sheepish.

“I was wondering when that would come,” he said.

“Explain,” Velma replied, and Daisuke sighed, leaning back against the cupboards.

Her phone kept vibrating on the kitchen countertop as he talked, and Velma looked at the unknown number flashing on the screen sceptically before looking back to her father. Daisuke broke eye contact, instead focusing on the trays he was pulling out of the oven, setting them more neatly on counter.

“So this,” Velma said, “is your friend Marnie from your book club’s friend Rebecca’s florist’s Aunt Terry?”

“Probably,” Daisuke said. “That’s what Marnie was telling me, that she’d probably call.”

“And she’s calling _me_ , because you told Marnie—”

“I gave Marnie some of your business cards,” Daisuke said, rubbing the back of his neck. Velma stared at him, her lips pressed loosely together, her arms crossing over her chest.

“I don’t have business cards, Dad.”

Daisuke coughed slightly, running a hand over his head, which in the past few years had gone almost entirely bald. He didn’t make eye contact with Velma as he said, making careful use of the passive voice, “Some business cards might have been printed for you.”

“Dad.”

“So answer the phone!”

“I didn’t consent to—”

“Answer it!”

Velma picked it up, bringing it up to her ear. “Velma Kuroda, sorry for the delay. Who’s calling?”

“Erm, hello,” said the voice on the other end of the line. It was hoarse and thready, the voice of an elderly woman, and Velma had to lean into the phone slightly, squinting her eyes and twisting her mouth in concentration as she tried to hear her better. “My name is Terry Alderman, and I was told I might phone you, erm, I got your number from—”

“Don’t worry about that, Mrs Alderman,” Velma said quietly, using her professional voice, calculated for maximum comfort and understanding. When Daisuke gave her an approving nod, she threw a tea towel at him. “Why don’t you just tell me what it was that made you want to get in contact?”

“Well,” the old woman said, and Velma could hear the thickness in her voice, the slight sharpness to her next intake of breath. She could see, in her mind’s eye, the woman at the other end of the line, perhaps leaning one hand against the end table, huddled in her housecoat – there was no doubt in Velma’s mind that this woman still had a rotary telephone in the hall beside the door, where the line had been installed by her parents, or perhaps her grandparents – and Velma could see, too, the threat of tears at the corner of the old lady’s eyes. “Well, it’s— It’s rather hard to explain, it started…” She trailed off.

“Mrs Alderman,” Velma said kindly, standing up from her seat at the kitchen table and beginning to pull on her coat. “Why don’t you give me your address?”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Daisuke mouthed at her as she scrawled the old lady’s address on a spare piece of paper before getting her other arm through her coat, and Velma gave him a vague wave as she walked out to the door to put her shoes back on.

\--

It was a sunny day, but the light had a deadened quality to it, the sky an unhealthily wan colour. The streets of Nottingham were busy enough, but she was lucky to avoid the bulk of the traffic as she moved out to Sherwood, and as she pulled in front of the old brick house, she took a moment to look at it from the car.

It was built, she would guess at a glance, in the late 1800s, and as she took in the red brick and the black-painted, stylised eaves, the arches around the windows, she inhaled and exhaled slowly, counting out her breaths. It was always important to make sure she was centred before she went into a new house.

Reaching under the passenger seat, she pulled out her briefcase, and left the car behind her to step up the steps toward the house. The garden was slightly overgrown, the lawn sprouting up from the ground, but the pots along the decking at the front of the house were all beautifully maintained, and the bench beneath the front window was impeccably varnished and in good condition.

She stepped up to the door, using the brass knocker (early twentieth century, a novelty one that didn’t match the other fittings on the door, and depicted Lord Nelson looking nobly outward) in absence of a bell, and looked down at the welcome mat, which was plain, hard brush. Scraping her shoe slowly over its bristles, she saw a chalky red residue come away from her soles, and she glanced back to the path she’d come up.

Where she’d walked on the pebbled path, the soles of her Mary Janes had left visible imprints, and yet it looked like the red residue was coming up from the ground to meet where she’d stepped, because it all but bled up around the stones themselves.

It was too dark to be clay, and as she knocked the knocker again, she leaned on the wall to bring her shoe up, touching her fingers against the bottom of it, feeling the stuff’s texture. It was thick, congealed, and when she brought it up to her nose, the metallic scent of it was unmistakable.

The door opened, and Velma looked at the old woman in the doorway, looking very small, wearing a burnished red housecoat and with her hair tied neatly up with matching red silk. Her eyes, which were a light-coloured brown, were watering, and she took Velma in, her mouth slightly open.

“The orange is overpowering, I know,” Velma said quietly. Past Mrs Alderman’s shoulder, she could see the mahogany table to the left of the hall, beside a brass bucket that contained umbrellas and walking sticks: the telephone was a dark red, some of the numbers worn off the dial, and rested neatly on its own cloth. Velma was almost surprised not to see a box for calling cards beside it.

“My girls, the grandchildren, used to love _Scooby Doo_ too,” the old lady said, and Velma smiled, putting out her hand to shake. Mrs Alderman’s hand was shaking, the wrinkled palm cold to the touch, but Velma didn’t comment on this as she shook it. “Velma… Karooda, is it?”

“Kuroda, Mrs Alderman,” Velma said mildly as Mrs Alderman ushered her inside, and she bent down to unstrap her shoes, setting them neatly aside on the shoe shelves beside the door, feeling the old woman’s approving gaze on her back as she hung up her coat, too. She saw more of the bloody residue stuck to the dark wood of the shelves and the coat rack, too, noting the way it smeared.

“And you’re, ah, Chinese…?”

“I’m Scottish, actually,” Velma said. “But my family are Japanese.”

“Oh, how nice,” Mrs Alderman said, slightly woodenly, and Velma could see her trying to do the internal mathematics this answer apparently required. “Well, you must have some slippers. The floors are so cold.” She pulled open a drawer beside the shoe shelves, setting a pair of white slippers down on the floor, and as Velma slid them onto her feet, Mrs Alderman led her further into the house.

Noise carried well. The corridors were wide-walled and high-ceilinged, and there were no rugs on the floors or hangings on the walls, the only decoration to the latter the carved pattern on the dido rail, and the transition from the wood siding to the red-painted wood. It was uncommonly dark inside, although the lamps let out a golden glow, between the ebony floors and wall siding and the dark red paint, but the kitchen was a little better, wan light streaming in through the windows and reflecting off the wood-lacquered surfaces, and the robin’s egg blue of the cabinets.

“You have a lovely home, Mrs Alderman,” Velma said as the old lady went to flick the kettle on. “I love seeing a kitchen keeping all the Victorian features.”

“It’s important to keep these things going,” Mrs Alderman said, taking two cups from a tailor-made set of shelving. The china had a pattern of wildflowers, the rims dipped in gold, and it made Velma smile slightly.

“Limoges, are they? Haviland & Company?”

Mrs Alderman turned, and her chapped lips turned into a bright smile, despite the exhaustion Velma could see her in her features. Here, in the light, she could see her features better. There was a purpling bruise on the side of her temple, and dark shadows under her eyes were only almost-obscured by the make-up she wore. Based on the slight swelling at her lower lip, Velma guessed that had been split in the past week or two, too, and was only just healing shut. 

“Yes,” she said enthusiastically, pouring the boiling water into a teapot. “The set was a wedding gift, for my mother. Her father brought them all the way from Limoges, packed them in all the tissue he could because he was so frightened of even chipping a saucer, and on the night my mother first used the set, he dropped the tray with the sugar pot on it.” Demonstratively, she picked up the sugar pot in question, and Velma laughed softly as she stroked the seam in porcelain where it had been repaired with staples. “That was when people used to repair things, of course,” the old lady said, slightly haughtily. “Instead of tossing everything away and beginning anew all the time.”

“Of course,” Velma murmured, tracing the dark seam in the pale china, where it bisected a delicately painted narcissus. “And do you often buy yourself antiques, Mrs Alderman? Is that where the situation arose?”

“Well, no,” Mrs Alderman said, and Velma saw the hesitation in her face, saw the stiffness come back into her shoulders. She looked old and haggard – she looked _frightened_ , and Velma felt a pang in her chest as she looked up at her. How old was she? Seventy? Eighty? For an old woman to be living on her own, to be dealing with something like this… “No, erm. Well.”

She set two cups and saucers each side of the small kitchen table, gesturing for Velma to sit down across from her, and Velma did so, sipping at her tea as she watched Mrs Alderman stare down into hers, her gaze faraway.

“When did the problems start occurring?” Velma prompted her after a few moments of silence had passed between them, and Mrs Alderman glanced up at her.

“A few months ago,” she said. “But they didn’t start all at once, you see. It’s— It’s rather awfully dreadful, now, but it wasn’t, not in the beginning.”

“It never is, Mrs Alderman,” Velma said. “These things take time to take root.”

Mrs Alderman nodded, setting her cup down on the saucer, and she carefully interlocked her fingers, resting her hands on the table as she looked at its dark wood. Then, softly, sounding almost embarrassed, she said, “We used to have an old house out in Ingoldmells. My granddaughter, she and her husband live in Skegness, and when I mentioned it, they said it was awful that the house was all rotting and not being used, you know, when they might do it up and rent it out, or sell it on. My father used to have property all over, you see, but this house belonged to an aunt of mine, and we visited once or twice, I only really remembered it existed when Sophie mentioned that they’d driven through Ingoldmells a few weeks ago.”

“Right,” Velma said, taking a few notes on a piece of paper. “And how old is the house? Like this one, Victorian?”

“I think so,” Mrs Alderman said, nodding her head. “Well, I had to go searching for the keys, because I actually had them in a box of old papers – my father, when my aunt died, had set the keys aside in the envelope with the papers. I remember, I asked once, why we shouldn’t have a holiday home so close to Skegness, and at the time… At the time, he just sort of waved me off, you know, and I thought nothing of it.

“But when Sophie asked, I found the keys, and I went with her and her husband, Douglas, out to have a look. I only very distantly remembered it – I was such a little girl, you see, when last we’d visited my aunt, I couldn’t have been older than nine – but it was very well-kept. The windows hadn’t been smashed, no one had tried the door, or anything – you know, this house had been left vacant for almost a century, it ought have been in some state of disrepair!”

She paused, glancing upward, as if it as a sudden noise, and Velma listened carefully, for anything happening upstairs, footsteps, voices, but heard nothing at all.

“Inside,” Mrs Alderman said softly, “inside was the same. No dust. No graffiti on the walls… Sophie and Douglas were delighted – it meant so little work, you see, they’d only have to do a few things to bring it up to the new code, and I was somewhat unnerved, initially, but I suppose it was just so strange I didn’t have it in me to keep wondering. So, we began to go through the furniture, you know, to see if there was anything worth keeping, and I think whatever—”

She flinched, again glancing upward, and Velma pursed her lips together when she saw the old woman shiver.

“I brought some furniture from there. All of my aunt’s things had been taken out of it – her clothes, the photo albums, her china, and so forth. It was only the furniture.”

“And do you still have all of it here in the house?”

Mrs Alderman shook her head. “I thought it was these little statuettes, because they were strange looking things, but I smashed them, you see, and it did nothing. Erm, I brought home an old screen, a dressing screen, you know, and, erm, two chaise longs, a mirror… Some paintings, but those are all set aside, wrapped in paper. And we sold the rest.”

“Do you have any photographs of the statuettes?”

“Erm… I don’t have a, a phone that takes—”

“That’s alright,” Velma said immediately. “Could you describe what they looked like?”

“They were white ivory, a sort of heavy, polished bone, painted all over in black paint. Complicated patterns on them, too, sort of like, sort of like lizards, you know, twisting over one another. When you put the two statuettes together, they…” Mrs Alderman trailed off, shaking her head. “Sophie was entranced by them, you see, but I couldn’t stand the idea of her taking them home. Seemed so very _evil_ , they did – when you looked at them, you could see the lizards coiling, as if the two little statuettes were becoming one thing…”

She shuddered.

“Couldn’t let her take them home, not to her children, you know. So I brought them here instead. I put them on the mantelpiece in the drawing room, as I never really go in there, thought I’d not notice them.”

“And is that when the incidents started?”

“No. No, you see, I couldn’t— I couldn’t stop going _in_ there. I’d wake up in the morning and put the kettle on, wander out of the kitchen, and before I knew what was what, I’d be sat on the sofa in the drawing room, just… watching them. You’ve no idea how, how horrible it was, I almost thought I could _feel_ those horrible, scaly coils all over me. Kept finding myself there, every time, and I tried to put them out with the bins, but I’d come down the next morning and there they were…”

“And it started in earnest after you smashed them?”

“ _Yes_.”

Mrs Alderman sniffed, and Velma held out a packet of tissues from the inside pocket of her cardigan, waiting patiently as she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She inhaled, shaking her head.

“You must think I’m such a silly old lady,” she said. “But it— I’m not imagining it, I really don’t think I am. I hear these noises all the time, now, scratching in the walls, pattering on the floors, and I wake up all hours feeling those coils all over me, strangling me, creeping down my throat!” She blew her nose again, letting out a quiet sob.

“I believe you, Mrs Alderman,” Velma said quietly. “And I’m here to help. Would you show me everything you brought back?”

“What will you— What will you do?”

"Well, it depends on what we're looking at, Mrs Alderman. If this is some kind of what we call a curse – a curse being a kind of enchantment attached to an object or location, which ends up imparting negative effects on the surrounding area – then I'll try to dispel it, or break it. If it's anything along those lines, if it's any kind of spellwork, there'll be a few different directions I can go with. However, if it's something alive, I'll have to somehow contain it, which might involve taking whatever object it's connected to away from you."

"Something— Something alive?" Mrs Alderman repeated, looking slightly green around the gills, as if the thought itself was a nauseating one. "Like what?"

"It might not be the case, Mrs Alderman," Velma said, standing up from her place at the table and draining the last of her tea from the cup. She glanced down automatically to look at the dregs of leaves in it, but it was nothing more than thoughtless habit - Mrs Alderman used teabags, of course. "Why don't we have a wee look, hm?"

The chaise longs were both clear. They were nice, solid things, early 18th century, and it was easier to put Mrs Alderman at ease by telling her about the manufacture of her furniture – it was plain that the woman ordinarily had a passion for interior design, especially for antiques, that had been shaken by recent experiences. The mirror, which had been set to hang in the stairwell, was a handsome thing with gold filigree all around its edges, and although it was a 20th century reproduction of a much older piece, Mrs Alderman still plumped herself up like a pleased hen when Velma said how well it suited the hall.

If the darkness was oppressive downstairs, it was even worse on the first floor of the house, thick curtains covering the windows at the ends of the corridors, and heavy doors ensuring that not even small cracks of light came out from any of the rooms. The light from the lamps up here was heavily shaded, tinted red by the shades in question, and Velma allowed Mrs Alderman to lead the way into a beautifully appointed bedroom, which was decorated in fine chocolate and tan shades. It was, truth be told, a little bland compared to the rest of the house, lacking a lot of the ornate stylings found in the other rooms, but Velma liked it – it wasn't distracting, but quaint and comfortable, just as you'd want a bedroom to be.

"This is the screen," Mrs Alderman said, pointing, and Velma smiled slightly as she came toward it, drawing her fingers delicately down the painted surface of the wooden screen.

"This is wonderful, Mrs Alderman, and I can assure you there's nothing wrong with it," she said. "This tree, here, it's called a Gingko Tree, and this screen is a Japanese piece. I'd guess it's from the late 1800s, maybe the 1880s, 1870s, around that time. This art style made a comeback around that time, the Rinpa School."

Velma turned away from the screen at a low hissing sound, and she tilted her head slightly, listening with care. It was too irregular to be the sound of gas escaping from something, or to be the noise of a draught. It was soft and venomous, heard at the very upper edge of her hearing, and she looked at Mrs Alderman in the mirror of her vanity instead of directly, so that the old woman wouldn't hide her flinch. As expected, when the hiss came again, Mrs Alderman jumped, shuddering, and huddled down in her coat, glancing around the room, but it was plain she couldn't see where it was coming from.

"Oh," Mrs Alderman said, wavering. "Well, that's— That's the last.... I can't think what else I might have brought back."

Velma looked about the room, examining it carefully. On the walls were some nice prints of a landscape painter she wasn't familiar with, in pale shades of grey, a series of paintings of some cliffside; the vanity looked rather modern, made in the '70s, but it was very well-loved, and it looked as though it was regularly painted and cared for; the wardrobe was a handsome thing of cherry wood, matched to the chest of drawers...

The bed evaded her gaze.

She noted it on her first pass of the room, the way her gaze was drawn away from the bed to something else immediately; on the second, she tried to concentrate on the cotton sheets, and almost could, but was soon dissuaded. Trying to look at the canopy, at one of the four posts, at the legs, achieved the same result: her gaze slid inexorably away.

"The bed new?" she asked. "The sheets, maybe?"

"No, no," Mrs Alderman said, shaking her head. She didn't turn her gaze on the bed, either: she kept looking at Velma instead, and Velma stepped slowly forward, toward it.

The movement of her hand was whip-fast, landing hard on the carved wood of the foot board, and Velma was immediately face-to-face with the black-scaled thing that rippled out of it, its teeth bared, its eyes smoking. She grabbed it around the throat, ignoring its desperate screech as hot, crackling steam came away from under its scales where her palm touched, and try as it did to scramble out of her grip, it couldn't, as she shoved it hard against the wood, forcing it to melt back into place.

It _was_ reptilian, sort of – its legs were little, strangely jointed things that jutted out from the base of its belly, but its body was built the way a snake was, with no shoulders, no real difference between the main bulk of its body and its tail. The legs seemed to have been added on almost at the last minute, not really looking as though they should be able to support its weight, as small as they were, and as widely spaced apart.

She could clearly see the design marked on the ornate foot board: coiling, snakeish patterns and some characters in a language she didn't know – Thai, maybe, or perhaps an Indian language. It was definitely the Devanagari script, but it was neither Sanskrit nor Hindi, and even before her eyes, the characters shifted, hidden beneath the seemingly moving coils as others re-emerged from beneath them.

Her hands steamed as she drew them away, loosely opening and closing her fists, and she looked to Mrs Alderman, who was staring in horror at the bed, her mouth open.

"Did your bed always have these carvings?" Velma asked in a gentle voice, and Mrs Alderman shook her head.

"No!" she said, horrified. "No, no, they never... No, I didn't even _see_ , how long—?"

"I expect," Velma said placatingly, shaking the steam off her hand before she gently laid her palm on the old lady's shoulder, "that when you broke those two statuettes you mentioned, that the demon inside was free to secrete itself into something else – in this case, your foot board. It could probably frighten you best from here, because you were most vulnerable when you were sleeping. When you went toward the statuettes, it was always just as you woke, or just before you went to sleep, right?"

Mrs Alderman nodded, still not tearing her gaze away from the foot board.

"I'm gonna need to make sure I break all of this thing's connections to the house, but honestly, it feels like it's pretty contained to an object once it binds itself, and it looks like after that, it contains itself to a particular set of boundaries. In the house out near Skegness, it was all neat and tidy, right? I noticed the same thing with all the plant pots outside, the bench - but you don't garden, do you, Mrs Alderman? Its reach doesn't stretch to the lawn."

Mrs Alderman was still staring, and Velma gently took her by the arm, leading her out of the room and down the stairs.

"I'm going to take the foot board off the bed," she said softly, sitting her down and flicking the kettle back on. Mrs Alderman stared dumbly at her. "Now, I'm gonna have to use some of my tools for that, but I should be able to replace it with a replica in similar wood, or you can have it without the foot board in future. For now, just have a sit down here..."

"Thank you," the old lady whispered, and Velma patted her shoulder as she set more tea before her, picking up her briefcase and heading back up the stairs.

As she worked, she put her phone on loudspeaker.

"Hey, Aunt Ginchiyo," she said as she dragged a saw neatly down the very edge of the foot board, where the joints were affixed to the posts of the bed - she'd have to pry those out, of course, but she was grateful the bed was old enough that there wouldn't be any glue, just good, solid joinery. As the saw came further down, a few of the shifting coils carved in the wood hopped out of the way of the saw's blade, but didn't force their way into the air again, which was a good sign, as far as containment went. "I have some sort of... I don't know, I think some sort of fear demon. I have it contained in a piece of wood, so shall I bring it around to yours?"

"No," Ginchiyo said, slightly shortly. "You're in Nottingham, right now, aye?"

"Yeah, I'm out in Sherwood."

"See my wee man in Nottingham town centre. His name's Hamish MacKinnon, and his shop is MacKinnon's Antiques, I'll text you the address."

"Aren't you home?"

"No."

"But—"

"Come down once you've seen Hamish," Ginchiyo said, and the line went dead. Frowning, Velma turned to glance at her phone. It wasn't like Ginchiyo to be so standoffish, or so short with her, but there was nothing to be done about it, no point calling the woman back once she'd hung up.

She focused on sawing away the whole of the foot board, setting it aside and then working on prying out the pieces of joinery that had been holding it in place with her chisel, setting them into a cloth bag before sanding off the splintered edges. It was a shame to do it to such a nice old bed, but these things had to be done.

Hauling the board under one arm and holding her briefcase and the cloth bag in the other hand, she brought them out to the car, pushing down the back seats so that she'd have space to lay the thing down. She was glad she didn't have to borrow a trailer off her dad to haul anything out – that was so often the case when she had to shift a huge piece of furniture, and it was a bloody arse of a thing to get done.

Mrs Alderman seemed in much finer spirits when Velma went back into the house, and Velma gave her a smile.

"Look, I'm gonna go back over the house, because it's completely possible I've missed something," she said, "but honestly, things like these are usually pretty simple, pretty routine. I've cut out the foot board, and there's no evidence that the thing's seeped out into the rest of the bed. The actual corridors seem a lot lighter, the shadows less pervasive, the air smells fresher – all of that, to me, is evidence that the problem has been removed. Now, that’s not at all definite, so you give me a call if you think _anything_ might be wrong, but this looks fine to me. Very simple job, Mrs Alderman."

"It's a— it's a demon, then?"

"Well, I didn't get a great look at it," Velma said. "See, the classification of "demon" is actually pretty wide-ranging, and it's not really my area of expertise, but from what I can gather, Mrs Alderman, its reach goes out from whatever object it binds itself to, and now that I’ve cut out the headboard, I’ll be able to take that away. That’s the important thing.

"What's also important to note, Mrs Alderman, is that you didn't do anything wrong, and you couldn't have possibly known what was happening – in fact, it was probably really good that you took this home instead of letting it be taken to a bigger family with young children, where it could have done more damage, so good on you for trusting your instincts. About your bed—"

"Oh, it's alright," Mrs Alderman said, shaking her head. "I hated that old bed. My husband, Albert, he picked it out. I was actually planning to get rid of at the beginning of the year, but then..." She trailed off.

"That would be the spirit's work, too," Velma said gently. "It's a little spell it does to protect itself – make sure that you don't focus on it for too long, or examine it, or think about getting rid of it. It probably wanted you to destroy the statuettes you mentioned because they were too easy to move, whereas a big bed like that is the real heart of a house, you know? Can I drive you anywhere, Mrs Alderman, or maybe call someone to come see you?"

The old woman looked embarrassed, fidgeting in her slippers. "Oh, no, no, this haunting business..."

"It was your niece that recommended you call me, wasn't it, the florist?" Velma asked, smiling sweetly. "Why don't I give her a call?"

Hesitating, Mrs Alderman bit her lip, but then she nodded her head, and Velma waited until the niece in question – a tall, burly woman who looked as though she might as easily arrange oak trees as she could flowers – arrived, and then she left them be. Mr MacKinnon's shop had no answer when she phoned the shop, so she just drove straight there.


	3. Chapter Two

Velma stood sceptically with her hands in the pockets of her orange denim jacket, leaning back on her heels. It looked suspiciously nice for a place that was going to take so much as a haunted tinderbox off her hand, let alone a demon-possessed piece of wood bigger than she was.

The sign declared the shop, in golden text, to be _MacKinnon’s Antiques_ , and it was probably the cleanest front she’d ever seen for any antique shop – stuck in the middle of a closed-down hairdresser and a keycutter’s, there was a noticeable divide on either side of the property, where Mr MacKinnon apparently washed the walls down with a pressure washer in perfectly straight lines. The terracotta brick, which was neat and symmetrical, was dazzlingly clean, and there were pots of flowers along the windowsill, as well as a red and yellow bench underneath the window.

The window display – a hand-written sign in the corner, made in a flowing but forthright script, declared that items in the display would go on sale the second Friday of every month – was made up of three of the most intricate dolls’ houses Velma had ever seen, each one of them lovingly furnished in different styles, the walls papered, the floors carpeted or set with tiny tile. The dolls were all involved in an elaborate wedding ceremony, the bride and groom stood on the balcony of the central doll’s house, overlooking plenty of other individual dolls, each kitted out in formalwear.

None of them looked frightening, or haunted. Each had surprisingly non-creepy features, and it looked… normal.

The whole thing was less than normal, she supposed – no _normal_ antique shop was this well-kept and clean, with strawberries growing from the window baskets and not so much as a smudge on one of the windows, let alone a speck of dirt or a bit of chipped paint. And that was _normal_ normal antique shops – not normal antique shops that bought and sold cursed and enchanted objects.

She couldn’t see anything past the display, because there was wooden backing on the stage that made up the front window, lined in deep red fabric, and the glass on the window only showed the little porch, where there was another door, and two wooden stands to set umbrellas and coats on.

The opening hours declared that the shop was closed on Mondays, but the **OPEN** sign was turned to face outward, and all the lights were on: when she tried the door, it opened freely.

Perhaps it was wrong of her, to be suspicious.

It couldn’t be helped: she was a suspicious person.

The door into the porch didn’t make a sound, but the inner door creaked ominously, and Velma stood sceptically on the threshold as it squealed shut behind her, surveying the room. _This_ was more like it.

Great, towering shelves went off in every direction, disappearing into the ill-lit corners of the shop proper, each one of them filled to the brim with stacks of thick, dusty books and dozens upon dozens of ornaments and pieces of glassware: as her gaze flitted over one of the closest shelves, the eyes of various ceramic horrors seemed to stare back at her, and she made eye contact with a particularly upsetting china toad, twisting her mouth at the sight of it.

When she took a step forward, a thick cloud of dust rose up into the air, the plume coming as high as her hip, and she couldn’t help but wrinkle her nose.

At the walls, more shelves were interspersed with ancient pieces of antique furniture, each of them caked with yet more dust and other indeterminate sorts of grime, some of them with rusty-red stains that were unmistakably blood. Her eye was caught by a crystalline lamp, tall and made seemingly of hundreds of interlocking pieces, which emanated a sickly yellow glow. She had to force herself to turn her head away, feeling her skin crawl, and she moved forward, ignoring the clouds of dust as she made her way further into the shop.

There was no desk in sight, no till, not even a little sign like you usually saw in big shops like this one, pointing you in the right direction. The shelves seemed to go on endlessly, down one corridor, until a full-length mirror in the middle of the way forced her to turn right, and then a glass cabinet forced a left. The shelves and towering furniture seemed endless, and that numb-prickle sensation of reality not being quite right was settling over her skin as she went further into the labyrinthine turns that led nowhere.

Was it a test?

It wasn’t unheard of, she knew, for some businesses to test new people before they worked with them, to make sure they were up to standard, but she’d never seen anything like _this_ – it was normally just putting an object in someone’s hands and seeing if they could tell it wasn’t _really_ cursed. Aunt Ginchiyo had tried it a few times with her, but this? This was new.

“Mr MacKinnon?” she called out, but heard no answer. Finally making the decision to turn back toward the door, she shifted on her heel, but where she should have seen another corridor of shelves, she saw only one, right in front of her, and it was so high as to reach up toward the ceiling, touching its grey surface.

She surveyed the objects on the shelves, each one buried under a film of filth and grime. At eye level, there were a series of ugly little goblin statues, and under the dirt she could barely make out their features, except for the eyes that glinted in the suddenly low light.

When she turned her head, another shelf loomed up on her left, another on her right, and behind her—

“Mr MacKinnon!” she shouted again, with more urgency this time, but her voice sounded muffled and muted, as though she’d called the name into a pillow instead of a room full of hard, wooden objects.

In front of her was an armoire. It was almost eight feet tall, she supposed, which left a decent gap between the top of it and the ceiling, unlike the bookshelves on her other three sides, but there was something about it she didn’t like, didn’t want to get closer to. It was made of an ebony wood so dark as to be almost completely black, and it was easily six feet across. It looked solid. It looked huge in a way she’d never seen an armoire before – it was gargantuan in the way unnatural things were, when they had more space inside than they should have.

Glancing to each side, she steeled herself, gritting her teeth: she’d have to climb one of the filthy shelves and then climb over the top of the armoire. Even if she couldn’t get down the other side, she’d be able to call out from there.

She couldn’t tear her gaze away from the armoire. The slight gap between its two doors was darker than dark should be, and now and then the doors would shift minutely, as though the armoire was, well…

As though it were breathing.

It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

A movement caught the corner of her eye, one that made her hands clench into automatic fists, and she brought them up closer to her face, to keep whatever it was from striking at her there.

It was only a tiny flicker, a dark jump of sudden, shifting air, again at her side, and she moved quickly to face it, but that left the armoire behind her.

She could feel it behind her. Looming. She could feel it, this great, monstrous thing, but she didn’t let herself flinch as she heard the slow, bonechilling creak of the armoire’s doors opening behind her. It was so loud it made her ears ache, her eyes fluttering closed for a moment, and she felt the back of her neck and the hair on her arms come out in goosepimples as she stood in place, rooted to the spot, scarcely daring even to breathe.

The armoire, impossibly – and yet not at all unexpectedly – let out a draught.

She could feel it at her nape, brushing over the gooseflesh there and at the back of her bob. Her eyes closed more tightly as she took in a long, slow inhalation, and then she turned to face it.

The doors were open wide, and just as she had suspected, the armoire appeared infinitely, unfathomably big. It could have swallowed Velma five times over, five _thousand_ times over – it could have swallowed England, could have swallowed the world.

And then the figure inside it leaned out.

It was a great mass of shadow, so tall and so wide and so _big_ that her head spun just trying to take in the sight of it, and when it lunged it fell on top of her with a weight unimaginable, forcing a wheezing sound from her chest as she hit the floor.

The shadows engulfed her, swallowing her whole as she tried to struggle, but she wasn’t able to even breathe, the pressure coming down so hard on her chest it felt like her ribs were liable to crack. Her shoulders pinned, it was a struggle to move her arms through the mass of impossible black, her teeth creaking she was clenching her jaw so hard, and she choked out a noise, breathlessly, trying to kick, trying to get her now burning hands on it—

“ _What_ do you think you’re doing?” cut a voice through the endless dark. It was a nice voice – older, rich-sounding, and distinctly Scottish, a highlands accent.

The mass of shadows dissipated like smoke, and Velma saw only a few wisps of it rush away from her. Little fragments of shadow, each scarcely bigger than her fist, went skittering across the floor and away from her at speed, more of them seeming to pop out of bare air to join the swarm. They rushed to the feet of a man who was looking down at them with his hands on his hips and a frown on his face.

The big armoire was gone, as were all the shelves that had hemmed her in, and now she sat up, coughing as she stared, disbelieving, at her surroundings.

This shop was nothing like the one she had entered.

Bright and airy, with a surprisingly lofty ceiling, it was probably the least cluttered antique shop she had ever been in. Pieces of furniture were organised in neat, even rows, apparently displayed in a loose colour order, and each piece had a clear label written on it in the same beautiful, simple script that was displayed in the window.

Against the walls were the shelves that had reached up to the ceiling, but they were now very sparsely decorated, each item with a clear gap around it, as if the ornaments themselves demanded a certain modicum of personal space.

“And what have you got to say for yourself?”

“I—”

“Not you, young lady,” he said. “I’ll get to _you_ in a moment.”

The man was short, fat, and he wore a sky blue jumper over a shirt and tie. His shoes – brown ankle boots with neat broguing – were polished to a finish. His hair was a blond muss about his head, loosely combed back from his face but not quite staying in place, and he looked sternly over a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, his hands on his hips, down at his feet.

They seemed more solid, now, the things that had been wisps of shadow. There were dozens of them at the man’s feet, stacked on top of each other, stumbling and wrestling for their places, and she stared at them, at their tiny bodies and their spiny heads, at their little legs and their little arms.

They were making… _noise_.

It wasn’t at all like speech, but more like the buzzing you might hear when too near to a wasps’ nest, though this sound was higher in pitch, and different noises seemed to overlap one another. Many of the little monsters were gesturing with their arms, of which they each had four apiece, hopping up and down, and a lot of them were gesturing with their wings, as well, which had joints that reminded Velma of a bat, but the leathery skin of them was more like a cockroach.

“It is _Monday_ ,” the man said finally, in a tone of declaration, looking away from the little demons and back to Velma on the floor. Striding past her, stepping over the monsters on the ground, he made his way to the door, which opened with a cheerful tinkle of a bell.

The bell was new.

“Are those alastora?” Velma asked as the man locked the front door, and she looked at them as they kept buzzing and crawling over one another. “I’ve only ever seen them in collections.”

“ _Who_ , young lady, might you be?” the man asked, tone arch, even as he bent over at the middle, encouraging the alastora to jump up and into his arms. They rushed to crawl up his arms, using his sleeves as handholds, and they hung off of him, a handful of them trying to climb into his shirt collar.

“I’m Ginchiyo Kuroda’s niece,” Velma said, pushing herself off her palms and getting to her feet.

His irritation seemed to bleed away slightly at that, and he looked at her appraisingly, his face a blank mask, before he said, “You would be Mei, I suppose?”

“Velma.”

“Velma,” he repeated, as though he had never heard the name before, and had no desire to hear it again. She concentrated on wiping the dust off her skirt and her cardigan, her jacket, but it had all faded away – the wood floors of this shop were perfectly polished, and it didn’t look as though there were a single speck of dirt in the whole place.

“You’re Hamish MacKinnon?” He gave a curt nod, and she asked, “Where is it you’re from? Inverness?”

“Good ear on you,” he said quietly, idly letting one of the alastora crawl over his palms. “I’m from a small village that’s now since gone, but I grew up near to Aviemore. Is there a reason you’re breaking into my shop at this time of the afternoon?”

“I didn’t _break in_ ,” Velma said sharply. “It was completely different, a second ago – it was dark and all but fucking labyrinthine, and them wee demons of yours fell right on fucking top of me!”

“Is that so?” Hamish asked, but he was looking at the demon between his palms, not at Velma, and once more the chattering started, all of the alastora complaining and defending themselves – at least, Velma could only assume – as Hamish frowned down at them, shaking his head. “Hm, well,” he said, finally, glancing to Velma with an expression of distaste still on his face. “As I said, young lady, on Mondays, we are _closed_.”

“But, Mr MacKinnon—”

“I do not know what your aunt has taught you about good business, young lady,” MacKinnon began, but Velma interrupted him, taking a step toward him that made the alastora scatter, a few of them rushing out from under her feet.

“Mr MacKinnon, I believe I have a demon-infested block of wood in my car, and with all due respect, my aunt wouldn’t have recommended you if she didn’t think you were a good person to call on. I am _sorry_ to impose on you, but I can’t really play a game with this thing. When I walked up the garden path of this woman’s house, the ground _bled_ , and it’s been torturing her with all kinds of hallucinations. If I can’t rely on _your_ expertise, Mr MacKinnon, would you be so kind as to offer an alternative in the vicinity?”

The venom all but dripped from every word, and although Mr MacKinnon was far from a tall man – he was only about five feet and four – she was taller, meaning that for once she had to down at his face, his plump, scowling face.

The scowl—

Faded, just slightly, as she looked at him.

“A demon?” MacKinnon repeated, somewhat crisply. “And what elements of its taxonomy would drive you to that conclusion?”

“Well, it was— It was black, with scales, four legs, glowing eyes, kind of came _out_ of the wood, and it… It started off in some ceramic things, and then when she smashed them, it put itself in the footboard, which tells me that it needs some kind of tether, that it can’t just exist freely. Based on the fact that it chose her bed, I believe it was somehow, uh, feeding on her.”

“Ms Kuroda,” MacKinnon said, sounding like he was on that strange edge between patient and impatient that reminded her of her teachers at school, “you say this was a demon. Mammalia or Insecta?”

“Reptilia.”

“And the species? The family? The order, even?”

Velma was silent. She had learned the most basic taxonomies when she was a little girl – Ginchiyo had said she didn’t put that much store by them, but Aunt Kimi had always been very dead set on them learning proper taxonomy and classification. She said it was important, when it came to filling out the paperwork on pest control, but Ginchiyo had never filled out much paperwork as far as Velma was aware, and she didn’t know that she expected to herself. 

Mr MacKinnon looked down at her, his pale eyes surprisingly severe behind the round, golden frames of his glasses, and then he walked across the room to the twin doors.

“That’s yours, I suppose?” he asked. “The rather clean little Ka?”

She didn’t know whether or not she was imagining the hint of approval in his voice.

“Uh, yeah. I’ll grab the board.”

MacKinnon didn’t step outside. He remained inside the dual protection of the two doors as Velma popped the boot and pulled out the board, holding it loosely under one arm. It was a heavy wood, but she was used to handling far heavier objects than this, and she carried it back into the shop, carefully stepping over the numerous alastora that rushed to mill about her feet as she set it, as MacKinnon wordlessly directed, onto the surface of his desk, face up.

MacKinnon pushed his glasses further up his nose as he stepped forward to examine it, holding his hands very neatly, almost primly, over it. The snakeish coils carved into the wood once more seemed to swim before Velma’s eyes, and she watched, dry-mouthed, as MacKinnon’s palms glowed a very soft blue, his eyes taking on the same sheen of concentrated magic.

It was the sort of thing she couldn’t do herself, but she wished she could.

Her own magic, the holy fire, was something she’d been born with, that she’d been able to do even as a very young child, albeit in a very clumsy way compared to now – it was magic that had been passed down from her mother’s side, and Aunt Ginchiyo had always been very pleased with it, had said how useful it would be in this sort of work.

It could only do a few things, though.

She could protect herself with it, of course, and attack with it; she could use it for a certain invulnerability to fire; she could take the taint out of things, could cauterise wounds or disinfect metal, but…

What MacKinnon was doing?

That was more refined magic, used for a specific purpose, not just an element being channelled in a particular direction. MacKinnon’s expression was blank as the coils shifted and moved on the wood, making Velma feel slightly nauseated at the sight of them, turning her head away.

She only looked back when Mr MacKinnon started talking in a language she didn’t know – it was an Indian language, she thought, but not Hindi and not Tamil, and yet the serpentine monster sitting on top of the headboard, its clawed hands neatly folded in its lap, apparently knew it well. It spoke very fast, and Velma could see the concentration on MacKinnon’s face, could hear the slight uncertainty in his voice as he did his best to communicate with it, to follow what it said.

It seemed much smaller now than it had earlier.

Small, maybe the same size as a ferret, and curled up as it was, sitting on its haunches with its body leaned forward, it seemed even smaller than that. If she could ascribe a tone to its voice, which was a quiet hiss, it would be… miserable.

MacKinnon and the demon talked back and forth for some time, MacKinnon’s responses slightly stunted as he did his best, gesticulating, but after a few minutes, he nodded his head and stepped away, picking up the receiver of the mustard-coloured rotary telephone on his desk and dialling in a number.

The alastora, for the most part, were milling about his feet, and as she watched, one of them clambered up his leg, grabbing at the fabric with its little claws until it reached his belly. Almost absentmindedly, he picked it up around the middle and brought it up to his breast, cradling it against his chest as he spoke on the phone.

She only knew some very basic phrases in Hindi, but she knew enough to understand “thank you” and goodbye as MacKinnon finished up on the phone, and then said a few more words to the demon.

It padded forward on the footboard, its black scales shifting under the light, and MacKinnon reached out with the hand that wasn’t cradling the alastor, stroking his thumb over the top of its rounded head.

“Would you be so good as to carry this upstairs for me, Ms Kuroda?”

“Yeah, Mr MacKinnon, of course,” she said as the demon clambered to coil around Hamish’s other hand, and she picked up the strangely plain wood. It felt lighter, now, although not by a huge amount, and she let MacKinnon lead her up a flight of stairs and into what would more accurately be called a workshop, rather than an office.

Against the wide windows, which did not open, she saw a lathe and a few workbenches, a multitude of carpentry tools hanging from a custom-made trellis on the side wall. Some of them, she recognised, but others were specialist tools she’d not seen before, and MacKinnon had to call her back to concentration, to get her to place the footboard neatly against the wall. Setting the demon on a countertop, Mr MacKinnon flicked on a kettle and reached into a small fridge on the countertop. It was only a tiny kitchenette, with the minifridge, the kettle, and a toaster, but he took a Tupperware box of some sort of raw meat, pouring a heaping pile of it into a bowl and setting it down.

The alastor in his other hand immediately tried to leap toward it, but MacKinnon kept it in a loose grip so that it couldn’t struggle free, setting the bowl before the new demon and saying a little more before he came back toward Velma, gesturing for her to go down into the shop again.

“What language was that?” she asked as she descended the narrow stairs, the bare boards of which were scratched all over, wood splintering at the edges of the skirting, although they were very clean. Her mind was awash with visions of the alastora pouring down them claws first, and she doubted very much that the vision in question was at all inaccurate.

“Marathi,” MacKinnon said. “A language I do not have a great command of, least of all when it comes to such a strong regional dialect, but we got by. It is not a _demon_ , Ms Kuroda – class Anima, order Consera, family Domicilia.”

Velma watched MacKinnon as he stepped toward his desk again, idly setting the alastor in his hand onto his shoulder as he leaned to make a note in his ledger.

“A house spirit?” Velma asked, and MacKinnon glanced up at her.

Once more, the disapproval in his face didn’t disappear, but it did fade slightly, and he gave a slight inclination of his head. “With so ill a command of the spirit’s language, I cannot make a determination of its genus, let alone its species – there are a hundred variations of domicilium native to the state of Goa alone, but it is indeed a house spirit. I’ve contacted a couple I know from Sattari who will come to better communicate with it – I expect they will take it into their employ, as I’ve never known many anima to begin the process of repatriation if they can find suitable lodgings wherever they’ve ended up.”

“But isn’t it— Isn’t it dangerous?” Velma asked, and MacKinnon seemed genuinely surprised by the question, his blond brows knitting together.

“Dangerous?” he repeated. “What ever do you mean?”

“Mr MacKinnon, the house I went into… It had made every corridor dark and foreboding, and this lady has been having more than just nightmares – she’s lost weight, her hair’s been thinning, she’s been feeling weaker and weaker.”

“Oh, for—” MacKinnon said, crossing his arms tightly over his chest and staring at her. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Velma said, unable to keep her own hackles from rising in retort, “but house spirits aren’t meant to _feed_ on those in the households they’re connected to.”

“And what else was it supposed to feed on? This woman gave it nothing – no honour, no prayer, no kitchen scraps, even—”

“She’s a mundie! And if this thing feeds on one person, it’s going to be _corrupted_ , it—”

“Corrupted,” MacKinnon repeated, scoffing. “I’ve never heard such poppycock in all my life. A house spirit, Ms Kuroda, cannot be “corrupted” into anything. There is no such thing as _corruption_ of a spirit or demon – you cannot hold them to your ridiculous ideas of purity or corruption. They are… Well, they are not dissimilar to animals. They eat when they are hungry – if no food is offered to them, they will take what they need. This animus is _thin_ , weak, it took the smallest amount it could manage from this woman despite her being its only option for sustenance. In a proper home, given proper food to eat, it will be a perfect protector of the home and hearth.”

Five or six of the alastora rushed over to MacKinnon at once, and he crouched down slightly, offering his arm so that they could collect in the crook of it, cramming themselves against his armpit and into the cup of his palm.

“I appreciate, young lady, that you are new in this field,” MacKinnon said, absently squeezing one of the alastora in his palm and making it release a grizzled purr of noise as it wrapped itself around his thumb. “But if you wish to step into your aunt’s place, this pseudo-Christian nonsense will really be better left by the wayside. _Corrupted,_ indeed!”

“What do you mean, step into my aunt’s place?” Velma demanded. “Mr MacKinnon, I’m not an antiques dealer – I’m pursing my MA in art history, _mundie_ art history. I’m going into curation.”

“You mean to say this is, as you children call it, a “side hustle”?”

Velma’s brain threatened to short-circuit at that.

“Mr MacKinnon, it’s just something I do when people _need_ it, to earn a little extra. But it’s easier to shift secondhand books than it is to do stuff like this.”

MacKinnon looked at her so coldly that Velma’s stomach did an anxious flip, but she didn’t break his gaze, setting her own mouth into a thin scowl and staring right back at him, taking a step forward.

“Oh, I do _beg_ your pardon, young lady,” Mr MacKinnon said darkly. “I had no idea your aunt’s mantle was so inconvenient for you to bear. Do forgive me for thinking you perhaps had some amount of ambition outside of taking up a sub-par Duffield Harding and setting it out for auction.”

“What the fuck are you _talking_ about?” Velma asked. “This isn’t my aunt’s mantle – this is _one_ house spirit.”

MacKinnon’s cold expression faltered. “You _are_ Ginchiyo’s niece?”

“Yeah.”

“And of the two—”

“She doesn’t have two nieces. She has one niece, and one nephew – I’m the niece.”

MacKinnon stalked across the room. It was not a way of movement that suited him, round and soft as he was, but it was still somehow intimidating, giving him the air of a man ready and willing to rip out your throat, and then very neatly clean the mess away afterward.

Reaching into drawer of the desk, he drew out a piece of paper with a business card clipped to its back, drawing the card into one hand as he read aloud, “Dear Mr MacKinnon, I am announcing with immediate effect my retirement from the business that has been my occupation this past fifty-two years. I will be contactable neither via my business phone nor my email, and all of the latter communications will be forwarded to my niece, who may be able to offer some assistance. Thank you for your many years of both assistance and business partnership, and my thanks for your understanding in this matter. Yours, Ginchiyo Kuroda.”

Velma stared at him as he held out, neatly held between the two carefully manicured fingernails of his index and middle finger, the business card, and she took it from him, staring down at it.

 **VELMA KURODA** , it read, **SPECIALIST IN ARTIFACTS ENCHANTED OR CURSED.**

There was a business email that matched her aunt’s, as well as a phone number she didn’t recognise, but it was the logo that gave her pause, her lips parting as she drew her thumbnail over it. It was the vague figure of a blank, human face, the only features it had the black bob and a pair of glasses, settled on a round, orange circle.

Ginchiyo’s logo had been a dark purple circle, the logo a curved dagger, drawn in the same minimalist style. They matched, despite the different colour schemes, and she set her jaw, risking a glance up to MacKinnon.

On the upside, the old man wasn’t glaring daggers at her anymore. 

“You seem very surprised,” he murmured. “I suppose she didn’t tell you she planned to refer all her business to you?”

“No,” Velma said. “But then, she didn’t tell me she was retiring, either.”

“Ah,” MacKinnon said. “Well.”

“Um, here,” Velma said, passing back the letter and the business card both and taking a step back. The alastora had apparently taken an interest in whatever had made their master so much change his tone, because they were queued up in funny little rows, staring up at her, their toothy mouths aghast, their many eyes concentrated on her. “I need to drive back down to London. I hope it all goes well with the house spirit, if it’s okay if I leave it with you.”

“Of course,” MacKinnon said, and the cheerful tinkle of the shop’s bell sounded behind her as she went back out to the car.


	4. Chapter Three

Velma had grown up in Glasgow, but when her father’s shop had gone under, at about the same time her mother had been made redundant, they’d moved down south to Nottingham, to be closer to Aunt Ginchiyo in London, as much as all the other reasons. The bulk of Daisuke’s stock had been sold off for much less than it was worth to accommodate the move, and now, he ran a little cake business at home.

She’d hated it, at the time, having to move away from home and have to put up with all these new children, missing her friends, having to deal with English people all the time, but now…

She didn’t know if she’d go back to Glasgow, once she had her degree. She’d used to say she would, when she was a kid, but she liked the convenience of London, liked being so close to her parents and to her brother, in case anything went wrong, in case they needed her. It was important to be on hand, if she was needed.

Aunt Ginchiyo’s apartment was down in Chelsea – she didn’t have a formal shop like Velma’s father had, but merely specialist goods for specialist buyers, kept out in one warehouse or another, and the home office at her flat.

Velma didn’t need to ring the doorbell: she knew the code to allow her into the building proper, and had her own key to Ginchiyo’s studio, which turned as easily in the door as it ever did.

Stepping over the threshold, Velma bent to draw off her shoes, setting them neatly on the mat for the purpose, and she closed the door behind her with a quiet click, setting her briefcase aside under the end table.

“Aunt Ginchiyo?” she called, but there was no answer, and she moved down the corridor, glancing at the empty kitchen, dipping her head into the empty living room, too. There was no sign of anybody, but Velma still knocked on Ginchiyo’s office door twice before she opened it, flicking on the light.

It was the barest she had ever seen the room.

Ginchiyo’s office was, ordinarily, covered all over with whatever pieces of research Ginchiyo was focusing on at the moment, snatches of spellwork or photocopies from history books pinned to the wall between photographs and sketches; every surface was ordinarily covered in neatly stacked books, pages of notes, artefacts on strings.

The long table against one side of the room was empty and bare, showing its wide, cherry surface; the architect’s easel at one side of the room was empty, the stool neatly tucked in; the side tables were empty, the bookshelves the most organised and scantly filled Velma had ever seen them.

Ginchiyo’s computer desk had a stack of business cards, a small stack of paperwork, and a handwritten note, and Velma moved toward it, glancing over the papers. They were deeds, deeds and transfers of ownership, and she picked one up, reading over the address of a storage locker in Peckham, a key attached to the page, the note outlining transfer of ownership from Ginchiyo to Velma Kuroda.

She picked up the note.

_Velma._

_I am retiring! As you read this note, I am probably on a plane out of the country to Jamaica: I will be spending some time there. If you have questions about my work, or about antiques… Ask Hamish MacKinnon! If you have questions about my retirement, or about magic, ask Hamish MacKinnon!_

_If you have questions about anything else… Ask Hamish MacKinnon!_

_Be back soon, probably not,_

_Love,_

_Ginchiyo_

Staring at the note for a long, long moment, Velma shook the mouse in front of Ginchiyo’s Mac, frowning when – as was always the case – the computer and monitor were already on, logged into Ginchiyo’s profile.

She had to pull the tape off the web cam as it began to ring on Ginchiyo’s end, and when the camera came into focus on the other hand, pixelated and shaky at first, then settling on a slightly blurry image of Ginchiyo behind the wheel of a car. Looking past her, out of the window, Velma could see long stretches of dessert landscape, and a flash of a green road sign.

“Are Jamaican road signs green?” Velma asked.

“Some of them,” Ginchiyo said guardedly, not taking her eyes off the road.

“And do they all have the highway shields on them?” Ginchiyo’s face froze, her mouth opening, and then closing again, and Velma went on, “You know, the ones they have in the US?”

“D’you know, Velma, nobody _likes_ a smartarse. Anyway, my name isn’t Hamish MacKinnon. I left very specific instructions.”

“Aviemore, Edinburgh,” Velma said. “The accents sound basically the same, and I got confused.”

Ginchiyo clucked her tongue, glancing toward the phone, and then looking forward again.

“Are you in trouble?” Velma asked.

“No, I’m not in _trouble_. Why would you think I’m in trouble?”

“Because you closed down your business of forty-five years, passing all control over to your inexperienced niece, then fled the country, all without warning. Including leaving a note saying you were going to Jamaica, when, in fact, you’re in… Where, Arizona?”

“I didn’t say Jamaica to everybody. Just to you. Gave a different lie to everybody of importance.”

“If I could give you some advice—”

“Don’t answer the phone,” Ginchiyo said, nodding. “That’s what I get, making exceptions for my niece.”

“What’s happening, Ginchiyo?”

“I wanted to _retire_ ,” she said. “What, you want me to wait until I’m Hamish’s age?”

“That man is sixty at the oldest.”

“That _man_ is pushing five centuries.”

Velma sat down.

“I wanted to retire,” Ginchiyo said again. “Every time I mention it, everyone would get all panicky about it, or offer me more money. Well, now, I have _enough_ money, and I’m going to travel.”

“And so your solution to everyone trying to contact you was to get them to contact me, instead?”

“Yeah,” Ginchiyo said. “I actually forgot you were at your da’s last night, so I posted the email login shite, but it’s in the wee notebook in the top righthand drawer. Feel free to use my flat as an office, by the way.”

“Coulda fuckin’ told me,” Velma muttered, reaching for the notebook and bringing up the email login in a separate tab. There was a phone number printed underneath the email info, as well as a voicemail code, and she could see the phone in the drawer, wrapped neatly in its charging cable. It was an old-fashioned phone, a flip-phone – the point of it was only to receive calls and texts, for business in the field, and she could open emails on her own phone. “Wouldn’t have to be sharing a flat with the pricks I live with.”

“Hey now, I told you not to live with mundies, and you ignored me. No wonder they’re pricks. Fella grows up not realising a lass can curse him so his prick falls off, he’s gonna be a prick himself.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works, Ginchiyo,” Velma said, inwardly groaning when she saw the tab on screen declare, in cheerful blue text, _Unread (113)_. “You announced this _yesterday_?”

“Set up a redirect, too, so all the emails to my account go to yours. And only the family can ring me on this phone. Blocked everyone else.”

“ _Dearest Ginchiyo, have you gone completely mad? Your niece is a child, and is a bumbling idiot compared to you_ ,” Velma read aloud. “ _Am I really to invite a twenty-something cartoon fanatic into my home?”_

“Email him back,” Ginchiyo suggested. “Tell him he’s a cunt.”

“Is that how you do good business?”

“You don’t want business with a cunt,” Ginchiyo said. “Anyway, that’s Rutherford Hanes, isn’t it? He’ll change his tune next week when he’s accidentally released another fuath into his house.”

“How do you accidentally—”

“He’s a driftwood artist,” Ginchiyo said. “Doesn’t pay any fuckin’ attention to what he picks up – wild mushrooms, salt, stone, branches, whatever, takes it home, then boom, big surprise, there’s a broonie smearing shite on his walls and calling him a prick.”

“Where’s he live?”

“Portree.”

“Christ,” Velma muttered, flicking through emails. “Ginchiyo, I’m not ready for this.”

“So? I wasn’t ready for it when I was your age, and I started younger’n you did,” Ginchiyo said. “Take the ones you feel ready for. You’re not the only lass who can do this stuff in the world. They can work with you, they can work with someone else, doesn’t matter. You just do what you feel like.”

“And if I don’t want to do any of it?”

Ginchiyo shrugged. “Then, don’t.”

Velma pursed her lips, letting her eyes scan over the email subjects, many of which had the words “unacceptable” or “unprofessional” in them, or a great many exclamation marks. She clicked on one titled _Urgently in need of assistance_ , and opened the email.

“ _Dear Ms Kuroda, I got your email address from a local psychic, and I hope you will help myself and my family, as we are in a time of great upheaval and require your assistance, for we are being plagued by small spirits, pictured here. They are destroying all the fibres in the house, and we haven’t been able to_ … Those aren’t _spirits_.”

She clicked on the photo to make it bigger, and she looked at the demon’s chitinous body, brightly yellow and green, at its laughing mouth as it patted its dozens of hands together, sitting back on its hind portions.

“They’re sticky imps.”

“Ah ah,” Ginchiyo said. “Full identification, please.”

“Class Demonata, Order Insecta, Genus Atermorpha, I think? The Genus is _demonata viscosa_ , but this one is the main species you find in houses, _conches viscosa,_ I think? We call them sticky imps because of the residue they all leave when they build their nests and lay their egg sacs – they chew up fabrics and fibres, then vomit up this awful ectoplasmic shite.”

“Good,” Ginchiyo said. “And how do you get rid of them?”

“It’s _easy_. You just need to burn some betony in the house, and once they all flee, smear a paste made from the ashes on the doors and the windows. They hate the stuff, and once they’ve left for a few weeks, they won’t come back.”

“So, write them back. Tell them so.”

“Is that what you’d do?”

“No,” Ginchiyo said. “I’d make an appointment, pick up some betony, and drive out to their house. If they can’t recognise sticky imps, they won’t be able to recognise anything else. Charge them a callout, come back home, Mke a few quid, cash-in-hand. Better than having to comb through charity shelves for six days hoping to find some Observers with the dustjackets still on, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t your callout charge a hundred and fifty?”

“Aye.”

“A hundred and fifty quid to burn a wee bit of herb? Twenty minutes’ work, all told?”

“It’ll be more than twenty. You won’t just be burning the herb, remember – you’ll be explaining what they are, how they breed, how to break their residue down, how to wash what’s left, how to clear their eggs away. Back in the eighties, you could drop your card into the local village, and get through a good few houses before you had to do anything else – just go to different houses and cart ‘em out, then charge a big premium for a little town council meeting, tell everyone how to do their preventative measures.

“I wouldn’t let them go free these days, though – mundies won’t notice, but magical people would. Take a box, capture them, separate box for the egg capsules, and you turn them into the English Society for the Protection of Magical Species. They’ll relocate them.”

“I’ve never tried capturing a colony of anything before,” Velma said. “I normally just look at an object and offer to take it when it’s making someone’s walls scream at night, not take a few dozen demons out of their house.”

“It’s not hard. Put a bit of rug in the bottom of a big box. Watch ‘em all get in the box. Put a lid on the box. Job done.”

“Aren’t they a bit smarter than that?”

“No, no, they are not. Stupid wee cunts, they are.”

“How can you—” Velma started, and then she pressed her lips together, her hands clasping one another in her lap. “How can you just _go_? What do you mean, _retire_? What are you going to do?”

“Relax,” Ginchiyo said. “Watch television. Go to concerts. Swim! Go to the beach. Fuck four girls in one night.”

“ _Ginchiyo!”_

“I’m _retiring_ , Velma. That means… I’m going to relax.”

“Relax,” Velma said. “You have a _responsibility_ —”

“Your responsibility now. I’m gonna leave you to it, Velm. My stop’s coming up.”

“I’m not ready for this.”

“So, get to it when you’re ready,” Ginchiyo said. “Bye bye, sweetheart.”

The call cut out with a quiet blip, and Velma leaned back in Ginchiyo’s chair, pressing her lips together as she glanced at the clock. It was nearly nine o’clock now, and she’d wanted to get the bulk of her essay started before she went to bed, but even as she looked at the screen, the current title of _Unread (109)_ became _Unread (110)_.

She wouldn’t reply to any of them, not until she’d made a definite decision, but it only made sense to sort them, so that when it came to replying to them, _if_ she ever did, it would be easier. She wouldn’t. She didn’t have the time, and she didn’t want to _be_ …

Basic folders, first.

Some of the emails were simple questions. A photograph of some droppings, and a question as to what demon had left them: Velma was fairly certain the “demon” in question was an urban fox; a photograph of a vanity table with an in-depth description of the enchantments inlaid into the mirror, with the simple question of when the actual table had been made; a question about proofing a new house against demons and small faeries.

Queries were a subfolder, then. But—

Some of them were just so _easy_.

It was the work of a minute or two to reply to each one of them, with a simple answer, and then to sort them into a subfolder for answered queries. It wasn’t difficult – and it was barely even work, really.

Some of the questions were more complicated, or required further discussion. She replied to those, asking for photographs, or asking to clarify points, or asking for more information.

There were genuine requests for help – for her to come out and identify a piece of furniture, when it had been made, who had made it, what spells and enchantments were laid into it; for her to come and deal with a pest problem, mostly demons, although a few seemed like lower classes of fae or spirits; for her to break certain curses, certain spells.

Not all of them _needed_ someone to come out. Just from a glance, some of them were such simple cases that it would only take for her to see some better photographs and write out some instructions to follow. Some problems weren’t problems at all – for one, a woman from Kettering was complaining about demons ruining her roses, but they were _scaldra_ , demons that ate aphids and other small insects, that helped maintain a garden and encourage it to flourish. The only thing ruining her roses, Velma was fairly certain, was her apparent tendency to over prune them.

And others…

**SUBJECT: Spirits in Pipes?**

**Dear Miss Kuroda,**

**I’ve been having a problem with noises in the pipes running through our family home. We’ve been abroad for nine months, and upon return, we’ve noticed strange whisperings in the walls, noises that seem to be coming from the pipes themselves, travelling along the same lines as the plumbing system.**

**Attempts to plunge the system or flush it out have done nothing to change the frequency of the noise – they’re low murmurs, where some words can occasionally be distinguished, but never any complete phrases. Nothing about them seems threatening or intended as harmful – merely that they’re loud enough to keep us awake at night, and they continue all through the day and night.**

**The initial thought when we called the government helpline was of course a basic haunting, but there’s no consistency to the words spoken or the schedule at which they sound, nor where in the house one hears them. We thought it would be best to call in a private contractor, in case of a spirit that needs to be somehow relocated.**

**The waiting period for a callout from the Department of Demonic & Fae Affairs is at least eight months, and so I’d be very eager to get a look at your rates, or to get a referral from you if you haven’t got the time on your docket. Even just information would be very helpful.**

**Yours,**

**Roberta Hammond**

That was interesting.

If it wasn’t to a regular schedule, it wasn’t a haunting – hauntings were normally connected to places, although she’d known them to be connected to objects, and they were caused by what the textbooks called “transferred life energy”. It wasn’t a living spirit or demon – it was just the echo of previous “life force” left accidentally imprinted on a space. They normally occurred on a loop, set to a very specific schedule. Because there was no consciousness in them, you couldn’t _solve_ them – you had to eliminate whatever the residual “life force” was attached to.

She hated the term “life force”. It always sounded like it should mean _soul_ , but it didn’t mean that, didn’t have that much emotional weight to it. Ginchiyo had explained it, once, had explained hauntings as… graffiti made with shadows as a stencil.

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. Sometimes, spirits attached themselves to the echo people left behind – that was what made a ghost you could reason with, talk with. They weren’t quite the same as people – couldn’t get really complex about it, couldn’t think deeply, couldn’t get into the complicated. They just animated what little was left – they puppetted the shadows left behind, but that was all they were, really. Puppets.

But this…

It was interesting. She’d never dealt with a spirited haunting before – she’d dealt with one or two haunted objects, but you broke that sort of haunting in the same way you broke an enchantment, by cutting through the imprint that had been left behind. But spirited hauntings became more than just a physical imprint – they almost had a life of their own, almost.

There were other emails to go through. Other emails to sort, to reply to, to—

It was three in the morning when she looked at the clock, and the screen read _Unread (29)_ , all of which were people asking to make appointments now.

“Fuck,” Velma mumbled, putting her head in her hands, and she shook her head as she stood, dropping the notebook and the phone both into her briefcase, shrugging her coat back on.

No more today. _No more_.

She would go home, she’d sleep for what scant hours she could, and then she’d go in for her seminar, and… And then she’d pick up a date book. She wouldn’t do _all_ of them. She’d deal with the sticky imps – they weren’t too far away, some little village an hour and a half’s drive out of London – and the spirited haunting, and there were one or two interesting little cases, all of things she’d dealt with before, or had seen her dad or Ginchiyo deal with countess times.

Just the easy stuff.

She didn’t have to become a complete professional. It would never be necessary for her to devote all her time to this, not really, but— But the easy stuff, yes.


	5. Chapter Four

The Atermorpha family was fairly wide-ranging, with all sorts of colours and subtleties, but the main shape remained the same: Velma thought they looked rather like caterpillars, but with harder, chitinous shells instead of softer skins. The segmentation of their bodies was plain, the many rounded pieces of shell stacked up against one another in accordion-neatness, and their many arms sprang out from the shells themselves, as well as many pairs of legs that came out from underneath their bodies, like centipedes.

The thing she liked about Atermorpha – the thing that made the different species so funny-looking, and made her laugh – was how human the features of their faces were. They usually had two big eyes, albeit with far bigger disc-shaped pupils than humans had, but they tended to have lips and a mouth that smiled, even a white edge of chitin just inside their mouths that resembled teeth, as well as an outcrop of chitin on the centre of their face to resemble a nose.

They just looked _funny_ – they laughed and they clapped their seven-fingered hands together, leaning back on just two or three pairs of legs and stacking their segments so they could sit up straight, and they were… Well, honestly, they were _cute_.

Oh, they were damned nuisances – they produced ridiculous amounts of slick, sticky mucus to insulate their nests and help them digest fabric sections, and the sound of their laughter was very loud and uncomfortably human-sounding. Their appetites were legendary – Velma knew a few stories about sticky imps eating royals in fairy stories out of house and home, going through sheets and curtains, let alone true stories of colonies establishing themselves in clothing stores and the like, but she couldn’t help but like them anyway.

Closing the third of the cat carriers on the sticky imps swarming over the piece of rug she’d tossed in the bottom, she groaned lowly, shaking her hand of the mucus clinging to her fingers, and wiped it off on a rag.

“Now what?” asked Stephen Whitely, the rather harried-looking father-of-five that had called her out. He was looking with uninhibited disgust and horror at the shaking cat-carriers, each of them rocking with the number of sticky imps crammed inside, and Velma walked back toward the house.

The betony was nearly burned to the end now, and she picked up the bowl, swilling it slightly and watching the shift of the remaining embers. “We’re going to add a little bit of water to this,” Velma said, “and get that paintbrush. All you need to do is dab a little bit on the doors and window frames – you don’t need much, and once it’s in place, you won’t need to worry about putting in more for at least another year.”

“And the eggs?” Whitely gestured to the neat pile of books Velma had pulled out from the centre of the sticky imps’ nest, each one of them encrusted with shiny green eggs, as hard to the touch as stone. She was fairly certain there were at least five or six hundred egg capsules across the brood, and thought it was fairly lucky she’d decided to come out when she had.

“I’m going to take those to the facility I was telling you about, as well,” Velma said, setting a wooden crate down and beginning to gently set each of the books inside, feeling the strange, smooth surface of all the eggs under her fingertips.

“They will destroy them, won’t they?” Whitely asked, anxiously. “I think they’re just— I think they’re just _horrible_. I mean, demons, in my home, _demons!_ People will think we live in a sty! _”_

“They don’t mean any harm, Mr Whitely,” Velma said, doing her best to keep her tone even, “and your home is lovely. You know how they say you only get headlice if your hair is already nice and clean? Sticky imps are the same – they’re attracted to nice, heavy fabrics that are kept clean, dry, and relatively free of dust. Unfortunately, once they find a house with the décor they like, they devour it.”

“Disgusting,” Whitely muttered, looking green. “Thank you so much for coming out to have a look at them, anyway – my friend Rebecca has worked quite a bit with your aunt, and I didn’t know that she’d retired until after you got into contact. You’re very capable. You know, given your age.”

It was said with the slight edge of judgement she’d received each time she’d done a house call this week.

“You look very _young_.”

“In your _twenties_?”

“It must be such a _lot_ for you.”

Velma held her tongue as she set the last of the books into the crate. It was the least of things to dislike Whitely over – the man was obnoxious, judgemental, sharp and impatient, and kept asking stupid questions while not listening to simple answers.

She _did_ write £300 on the invoice instead of £150, but Whitely didn’t even blink as he opened the bank transfer app on his phone, and she couldn’t help but wonder how much extra she could have charged before he thought anything of it.

After wrapping the cat carriers in bin bags so that there was less chance of the sticky imps getting free, she put them in the boot of the car, placing the crate of egg-encrusted books on top. It was just before four o’clock, and she could see Whitely’s husband walking briskly to keep up with the rushing kids home from school, all of them sprinting toward her.

She didn’t dislike kids, but the Demon Protection Society closed at five, and so she was quick about waving them goodbye before getting into the car. It was going to be a tight call, she thought, to get to the sanctuary in time, but she’d told them in advance that she’d be coming.

Her phone rang as she pulled back off the motorway, and she tapped to answer the phone when it came up with an unknown number.

“Velma Kuroda speaking,” she said, glancing at the sign for the next roundabout and trying to remember if it was the first or second turning she was meant to take. “How can I help?”

“I have just heard word on the grapevine,” came the unmistakable Highlands accent from the other end of the line, “that you are acting as exterminator.”

“I am not acting as exterminator, Mr MacKinnon,” Velma said, not bothering to keep the scorn out of her voice. “I have a car full of sticky imps, and am currently driving them to the DPS in Basingstoke. Who the fuck knows _you_ in Southampton?”

“I have all sorts of contacts all over the place,” MacKinnon said snootily, and Velma scoffed.

“Yeah, I bet,” she said. “You strike me as a very popular man. What do you want?”

“I just thought you might like to know the house spirit you rescued in now quite contentedly watching over a charming two-bed in Cheadle. I’ve been sent a number of amusing photographs of it posing on the end of the stair’s bannister, where it apparently likes to imagine itself a gargoyle. It enjoys Disney movies, and apparently knows several very haunting lullabies that the children are quite in love with.”

That was… cute. She felt herself deflate, pressing her lips loosely together, and she listened to the silence at the end of the line. “That’s nice,” Velma said, albeit shortly, and took the second turning, vaguely recognising the signposting ahead. “Thanks for telling me. It’s… alright, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Hamish said. “Has its own shrine and whatnot, looks as though it’s going to be properly cared for, now. How many sticky imps did you pick up?”

“About sixty, I think,” Velma said. This was different, all of a sudden, wasn’t exchanging barbs with the old man, but just him… asking. “But there’s easily hundreds of eggs in my boot as well. The guy that rang me out was a professional styler and decorator, so he was obviously a bit more sensitive than most blokes would be about their curtains getting eaten.”

“Well,” MacKinnon said. “I don’t suppose you have an opening in your no-doubt jam-packed date book? I can’t imagine you would have any interest in looking at mere antiques, after so exciting a week, but I must ask nonetheless.” Okay. Not just asking.

“Are you this much of a bitch with everybody, Mr MacKinnon, or is it just people you’re trying to hire?”

“Well, if it _is_ too much, dear girl,” the old man said, catty as you please, “then—"

“What’s the job, Mr MacKinnon?” Velma asked, cutting through before he could go on with his waffle.

“I should appreciate for someone to have a look at a storage locker for me. A friend of mine died some time back, and bequeathed the contents to me – as the locker in question is in Cornwall, I haven’t yet made the trek out there. I wondered if I might ask _you_ to go in my stead.”

“And do what?” Velma asked. “Inventory it?”

“An itemised inventory would be a start,” Hamish said. “I really have no idea as to the contents. If there were anything very valuable, I might ask you to bring it back with you.”

“I’m behind the wheel right now, because the DPS is just down the road from me,” Velma said, “but I’d need to set at least a day or two aside to go down to Cornwall.”

“I would pay for your fuel costs and organise a night’s accommodation in Cornwall, of course,” Hamish said. “On top of your fee.”

“Okay, what’s in this locker that you want me out there so desperately? The Ark of the Covenant?”

“You think perhaps it has moved from display in the Empyrean Museum in Harare,” Mr MacKinnon said, smooth and more than slightly condescending, “to a neglected storage locker in Falmouth?”

Velma opened her mouth, then closed it. “I’m free the weekend after next. You sure you don’t want to come? Little carpool down to Cornwall, get some sandwiches at the service, we could—”

The line clicked off. Velma nodded to herself as she pulled into the DPS’ mostly empty car park, pulling out her datebook from the shelf under her radio and scribbling down a note on the right date. She’d email the grumpy old bastard later, just to confirm.

He was just… _annoying_.

He was such an _annoying_ old man, possessed by a legion of equally annoying demons, and it was… Velma made an irritable noise to herself, adding Hamish’s contact to the address book in her phone, and as she did so she heard a skittering from the back, some of the imps whining in their confinement.

“Just a second,” she called back, in what she hoped was a soothing voice. She really wasn’t sure how much they understood, if anything. “I’m gonna get you out in a minute.”

She shut the door closed – she hadn’t chosen a parking space, but backed in just before the glass double doors of the building, which was slightly off the main track of the road. There had been a sign directing her into the Demonic Protection Society, but it had been magically obscured, and there were no big signs here on the actual property, like there were at RSPCA locations.

“Afternoon,” she said as she stepped into the empty reception, looking to the extremely wizened, elderly woman behind the desk. “I’m Velma Kuroda, I called at about one o’clock today about some imps I’d be bringing in?”

“Ah…” the old lady said, reminiscent of a sloth in the way she slowly rose from the desk, so slowly that it made Velma wonder, for a moment, if she was seeing the old lady move in slow motion. She picked up a phone, dialling in what seemed like three hundred numbers before she head, “Mmm, Doc-tor? Yesssss. Mmm _hmmm_.”

Her eyes were solid blue, no pupil, no sclera, and Velma watched as the old woman melted down into a pool of yet more blue, sliding slowly toward the door.

“Ah, you’d be Velma Kuroda,” said a blond woman in her forties, coming out of the back office while pulling a glove onto one hand, putting out the ungloved hand to shake. “I’m Doctor Kim Eustace, I talked with you on the phone earlier. You’re certain these are _conches viscosa_?”

“Pretty certain,” Velma said, watching the blue slime drag slowly over the floor, out of the automatic doors and toward the car. “I have fifty-seven, I _think_ – it was hard to count them when they move around so much, even once they were all packed into the cat carriers. I didn’t even try to count the eggs – I’d guess there’s a few hundred.”

Doctor Eustace, to her credit, looked genuinely excited as she pulled on her other glove, moving more quickly forward, and when Velma opened up the boot, she immediately pulled some of the black bag aside, peeking into one of the cat boxes. The demon slime was gelatinously moving toward them, still very slowly, but when Velma picked up the box of egg-encrusted books, it slowly stretched up toward her, arranging itself into a roughly flat surface.

“She’ll take the box off you,” Doctor Eustace said casually, waving her hand. “Marnie here likes eggs.”

Velma passed over the crate, and the slime – Marnie – began to move slowly toward the doors with it, a column of shifting blue slickness.

“She hasn’t got a great handle on using spoken language,” Eustace said, “but she understands everything well enough.”

“She’s a demon?”

“Mmm,” Eustace said, pulling out one of the cat carriers and looking with interest at the imps that lurched to the lattice front of it to look at her, sticking out their arms to try to grab at her hair, her coat. “They’re classified under _insecta_ , but honestly, we tend to just call them goo-man, you know, like human? They’re great at mimicry, even if they’re slow, and they like being around people. These guys look healthy, well-fed.”

“The house was owned by an interior designer,” Velma said, stacking the other two cat carriers on top of one another and lifting them up from the boot, stepping back so that Eustace could pull it closed. “Lots of different fabrics, expensive ones – mix of vintage and contemporary, although to be honest, none of the vintage stuff was older than fifty years old, which in interior design terms—”

Doctor Eustace was looking at Velma very blankly, and Velma shifted her grip on the imps, feeling them rush about in the carrier, making low noises to one another. Some of them were repeating snatches of phrase – “Hello, hello?” and “Terms, terms!” – but they didn’t sound too frantic or desperate, more curious than anything else.

“Never mind,” Velma said. “They’re not really frightened or anything – do they not have natural predators?”

“Not in this dimension,” Eustace said. She was stumbling slightly with the single cat carrier as the imps rushed around inside – Velma had better balance and stronger arms than she did, apparently, but the doctor managed to make it back inside and down a corridor without letting the imps tip her over. As she led Velma into a plastic-walled cell, one in a row of a good dozen, she went on, “In the nether dimensions, sticky imps have all sorts of natural predators, but they were one of the first species to adapt to the colder temperatures and oxygen-rich atmosphere of Earth. There’ve been sticky imps here, in what we broadly call the mundane dimension, for about eight thousand years. These guys, _conches viscosa_ , they don’t have to subsist on fabric – in other places, they eat plant fibres, but these guys have figured out it’s way easier and way tastier to find a nice home and eat the carpet instead.”

She flicked open the front of the first cat carrier, letting the imps rush out, and Velma stacked the other two carriers on top of the first, opening them. They moved in a swarm, the slimy collective bouncing off the walls and letting out their loud laughing noises.

A few of them rushed toward Velma, then let out screams and yelps when they smelt the betony still clinging to her clothes, rushing to the walls again. They left grey streaks of slime on the plastic, and Velma wrinkled her nose, laughing,

“What will you do with them?” Velma asked as Eustace idly peeled off the sticky imp clinging to her arm, stopping it from gnawing at the shoulder of her white coat.

“Well, we’ll have a look at the colony,” Eustace said, examining the sticky imp giggling between her hands. It wriggled and jumped when she tickled its undercarriage, making her smile, and she tossed it to join the rest. “See how healthy they are, measure them… If we’re allowed to release them, we’ll spay them all, tag them, and send them on their way, probably release them either on one of the heavily forested islands or in one of the Alban reserve parks. Alba are the best on demonic preservation, you see, the government across Loegr and Cymru are… Well,” Eustace muttered, gesturing for Velma to follow her to the door and letting her out first, closing it behind them. “We’ve made strides in recent years, don’t get me wrong. It used to be much, much worse. But it’s hard to get license to release demons like this, once they’ve been into a human household, because the assumption is that they’ll just try to get right back.”

“That’s true though, isn’t it?” Velma asked. “Like you said, it’s much easier for them to eat fabric than plants.”

“True enough,” Eustace said, “but the Alban parks account for that. They have infernal registers on the reserve borders – it doesn’t affect the complicated demons, you know, the ones that are sentient and use language and might be liable to go for a hike, but demons like these would be kept within the borders, and would get used to eating plant fibres again. The reserve parks tend to be smaller here across Loegr and Cymru, and they’re a bit less wild than the Alban ones – we use more of the land for ritual, there’s more territory ceded to fae nobility…”

Velma was quiet, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that she’d never learned much about kingdom politics. She had an Alban passport as well as her mundie one, of course, but it all struck her as difficult to follow. The mundies made it easy – different political parties, people voted, people won, whatever. But the lines between the king and king regent across Cymru-Loegr, or the king in Alba, or the queen in Cernw…

And that was without even thinking about the situation across Ireland.

“Why wouldn’t they let you just take the imps up north?” Velma asked. “If Alba can do it, and they can’t—”

“Too much risk of escape,” Eustace said. “They’d say it was better to put them all down.”

Velma took this in. “But they’re not _harmful_ ,” she said. “They’re not dangerous. It’s not like they eat _people_.”

“King regent’s been in power a good few hundred years,” Eustace said. “He’s still in the past, as far as demons go.”

“Can you guys keep me updated? Let me know what the status is with them?”

“Of course,” Eustace said, bringing out her phone and holding it out for Velma to tap in her details. “And if you come across any other demon colonies, you can contact us, or any of the other DPS sites. It’s refreshing to have someone in contact with us who doesn’t just want to learn the best way to kill them.”

\--

She had another job that evening. It wasn’t really a job _to_ do anything – a woman her dad knew in Coventry had done a clear-out and didn’t own a car: she wanted to get rid of an enchanted vanity table but couldn’t drive it out to the disposal centre herself, and she couldn’t exactly leave it out for the binmen. Velma had offered to pick it up as a favour, but she figured she’d drive straight through up to Nottingham, drop it off with MacKinnon if it was worth taking, and then stay the night at her parents’.

“Is it broken?” Velma had asked as she’d examined the vanity table, but even as she’d said it, she’d drawn her fingers over the swooping, delicately carved patterns on the wood surface, feeling them glow to life under her touch. Light crested about the edge of the vanity’s mirror, illuminating it, and even as Velma leaned over the surface, she saw the mirror’s view shift its angle, showing her the sides of her cheeks, her profile, without moving the mirror itself at all.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Mrs Worrall said. “No, it’s a lovely set of enchantments, you know – the mirror shows different angles, and shows your skin very close up, and here, there’s enchanted storage capacity, too…”

Opening up one of the drawers, she showed the compartments, and the magical belt that lined them – you could scroll through whatever was stored along the belt, and the other contents would move into magically-created space elsewhere in the vanity, so that the storage capacity was increased fourfold.

“But this was my daughter’s before she moved over to Australia, you know,” Mrs Worrall said, “and I don’t do much makeup myself. Thought you might be able to take it to someone who’d use it.”

“Yeah, I’ll take it for you,” Velma said. “Can I help you with anything else, or…?”

“No, no, just that!”

Velma nodded, giving the old woman a smile, and her smile widened when Mrs Worrall admiringly commented on how strong she was, taking the vanity into the boot of her car on her own.

It was dark when she pulled up outside of MacKinnon’s antiques, past eight o’clock, but the lights were still on inside the shop, and the doors were open.

Stepping inside, she stood with her hands in the pockets of her cardigan, watching MacKinnon work.

“You didn’t grow up with enchanted furniture, I take it?” he asked kindly, and both of his customers shook their heads. “It’s been making something of a comeback for trendy young people in recent years – used to be the typical housewarming present for a married couple up to the late eighteen hundreds, but what with all these mundane advancements, a good enchantment was dropped by the wayside.”

It was a couple, two women a few years older than Velma, the pair of them an exercise in contrast: the taller one, pale, thin, with heavily lidded eyes, was dressed all in red, scarlet jeans, a red bralette, a flaming leather jacket; the smaller woman was dark-skinned with a golden undertone and a shaved head, dressed in sunshine yellow, and the style of her jacket was the same as her partner’s, like they’d been made to match.

“We’re not married,” said the tall woman. Her voice was husky and low, as though she’d been gargling lit cigarettes, and Hamish raised his plump hands in a gesture of innocence, smiling.

“Oh, I know, I know, but… You never know,” he said mildly, with a surprisingly charming wink, making the smaller one laugh. Velma pressed her lips together to stop herself from huffing out a laugh, he went on, “Let me demonstrate this wardrobe for you, in any case.”

Gesturing with his fingers, he waved toward a slim wardrobe Velma had seen the last time she was in Mr MacKinnon’s shop, and Velma watched as the mahogany doors opened outward, revealing the great space inside, the twin mirrors on each door.

“Now, let me show you the enchantments,” Hamish said, conjuring a little light to glow from his fingers, and he illuminated the carefully carved symbols that were carved around the edges of each of the mirrors. “Do you know how enchantment works, did you study it at school?”

“I didn’t come into magic until I was into my twenties,” said the tall girl, shrugging her shoulders.

“Inheritance?” Hamish asked.

“Accident. I crashed my car into a fairy tree while I was visiting family in South Kerry. Got arrested and tried in the fae courts.”

Hamish’s face became very serious, his lips loosely pursed together, his gaze focused on her face. “How long did they give you?” he asked softly.

“Only two years,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t drunk or anything, and there were icy roads, so they were fairly lenient about it, it was just that… I actually swerved _into_ the tree, because there were cows in the next field, and I didn’t want to hit any of them. The judge didn’t like the idea that I’d weighed a cow against them and the cow had won.”

She said it quietly, solemnly, and Hamish nodded his head, his expression mirroring hers. Velma’d never dealt with fae in all her life, but she knew people that had, and Ginchiyo had warned her about them, growing up. Their laws were complicated, as far as magical ones went, but they had much more power westward and up north than they did down the centre of England – of Loegr.

“I learned some magic from my grandmother growing up,” said the shorter girl lowly, her fingers brushing her girlfriend’s wrist, to comfort her, Velma supposed. “But it was all active magic.”

“Active magic. A very recent way of thinking about it, active magic versus passive,” Hamish said, with a wry smile, and he turned back to the wardrobe, spreading the fingers of his right hand and expanding the glow that came out from his skin, bone-deep, the light tinted slightly red where it came through the flesh of his palm. “An enchantment, my dears, is not so different to the circuits you learned about in school, hm? Each symbol is a component in the enchantment, and magic travels through them much in the way electricity travels through a wire: one creates a circuit. Once the circuit is made, magic tends to move constantly through it, looping over and over – thus the tendency to refer to it as _passive_ or _inactive_ magic. Once an object is enchanted, one does not need to provide energy in the moment: the enchantment merely lasts, usually for quite extensive periods, with little need of replenishment.”

“Do you know what all the symbols mean?” asked the shorter woman.

“Yes, of course,” Hamish said. “I learned enchantment when I was a boy, although I studied a different school to this one – this being rather traditional Cymru enchantment. As a mode of enchantment, it has its very roots in early faerie styles, but quickly developed its own little quirks and tendencies. It began to come into its own in the fifth century.”

“Because of the king regent?”

“He wasn’t king regent then,” Hamish murmured, and Velma didn’t think she imagined the catch in his face, the slight twist in his expression. “But yes. Myrddin Wyllt took much from the fae, when it suited him to learn from them.” Turning back to the wardrobe, he went on, “But the individual symbols don’t mean much, honestly. Some enchantments are put rather poetically, telling a narrative or at least something sweet to read aloud, but this isn’t one of them, I fear – the etchings you see here primarily create the space expansion in the wardrobes. It’s a slim little number, but can accommodate a good six times what its capacity would be. Self-cleaning, dissuades moths, dust, small magical creatures that might cause similar damage – small imps, pixies, and so on. And like so…”

Hamish placed his palm on the centre of the righthand mirror glass, and Velma watched as it lit from within, forming an image of Hamish himself. It moved and shifted, smiling out of the glass, standing straight with its hands behind its back, but it wasn’t a direct reflection, and Velma wondered what it was for until Hamish drew a symbol on the glass. The colours the reflection was wearing changed: its neat plum-coloured jumper was replaced with a woollen cardigan and a pressed shirt.

“Oh my god,” said the tall girl, leaning forward, her lips parting in fascination. “That’s _brilliant_.”

“It only works with anything you already have in the wardrobe,” Hamish said, gesturing to the dry-cleaning bag neatly pushed to one edge, “and I’m afraid it isn’t the most discerning of spellwork, so the way it displays size is often a little wrong – it was made on the assumption that one had tailors to hand, you see, so it will just tailor whatever is hanging to the reflection it’s given.”

“Do you have to learn a lot of symbols?”

“A few,” Hamish said. “The drawback to that, of course, is learning to become confident in drawing them on the glass, especially as symbols have to be drawn in a particular way – the movement of one’s finger or the brush one uses is just as important as the shape one produces. With that said, it’s a very flexible piece of magic as a result, and is a lovely introduction to the craft.”

“Would we both be able to use it? If it doesn’t understand size, I mean?”

“Oh, yes,” Hamish said. “One can calibrate this for as many people as one likes, if one keeps coming up with symbols to use – all you do is paint the symbols you wish to use on the hangers, and then you draw the symbol in question over and over to cycle through garments. The gentleman who last owned this owned it alone, but separated his wardrobe for the seasons.”

“So everything has to be on a separate hanger?”

“I’m afraid so.” Hamish gestured a banishment over the glass, carefully closing the wardrobe doors, and he smiled in an easy, genial way. He could see the hesitation in their faces, their body language, Velma supposed, although they both still looked to her like they were smiling politely. “Not very practical, is it?”

“Not really,” said the smaller woman. “It looks really cool, but we were hoping for something a little more useful.”

Velma stepped forward, and Hamish looked over their shoulders, arching his eyebrow at her.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr MacKinnon,” Velma said. “But I’ve got that vanity I told you about. Enchanted with a mirror backlight and a variable focus on the glass, as well as the extended makeup storage?”

MacKinnon’s expression gave way to a small, subtle scowl as the young women shared an excited look, but he didn’t make any protest. He nodded his head, a crisp, sudden inclination of his chin, and Velma went out to bring the vanity in.

It was painted a creamy white colour, rose petals painted as though falling around the curves of its front legs, and as the women examined it, talking excitedly to one another about the mirror, Velma leaned in toward Mr MacKinnon and muttered, “Sixty percent.”

“I will be a _generous_ man,” MacKinnon replied, “and allow you thirty. I believe I did _tell_ you, Ms Kuroda, to telephone in advance whenever you wish to—”

“Old lady just wanted the thing tossed,” Velma said. “Figured you’d get a use out of it, although not as quickly as this. What are you going to give it to them for? Eight hundred?”

“I’ll offer it at nine-fifty,” Mr MacKinnon said, “we’ll see if they haggle.”

“People our age don’t, usually,” Velma said.

Mr MacKinnon released a disapproving noise, giving Velma a sharp look, as though this fact was somehow caused by Velma herself, and she was orchestrating the lack of haggling among her generation just to upset old men in antique shops. The girls came back toward them, smiling, and Velma stepped back as Mr MacKinnon moved forward to deal with them, fiddling with some of the things on his desk.

He had a very neatly appointed date book, bound in dark leather, and the two girls were written in, in a sloping, graceful hand, _8pm, Annabella Hartley & Josephine, ref. Jane Buggle. Enchanted home furnishings. _

“Have you eaten?” Mr MacKinnon asked, crisply, after Velma had helped the Annabella and Josie get their vanity into back of their Subaru, and come back into the shop. Velma stared at the old man, waiting for some other addition to this question, but none came.

“Uh, no, not yet,” Velma said, “I was just going to drive over to Mum and Dad’s, and—”

“Ridiculous,” MacKinnon said, moving over to the front door with an air of finality and locking it with a click. “It’s nine o’clock at night. You can’t possibly drive on an empty stomach – when did you last take something in?”

“I ate a sandwich at one,” Velma said, baffled. She followed the old man, not really sure what else to do, as he led the way through an archway, pushing the red curtain that hung in it aside, and beginning to ascend a narrow, steep staircase.

“ _Preposterous_ ,” MacKinnon was saying as he bustled up the stairs, never once softening his irritable tone. “Starving yourself and driving halfway across the country, and declaring you will starve yourself for some while longer.”

“I’m not starving myself,” Velma said, “and you don’t need to feed me, Mr MacKinnon, I’m going to—”

“ _Hush_ ,” MacKinnon said, and turned off the staircase. Velma came up a bit more slowly to the landing, which was carpeted in a Turkish rug pattern, dark reds and yellows making the dark space seem even darker, and she glanced up the next flight of stairs, which led up and into what seemed like complete darkness. “And you might as well call me by my forename.”

As she crossed the threshold of Hamish’s flat, which seemed to be neatly settled above the shop, she had to step back from the cloud of chattering demons that rushed past her, toward the modest kitchen.

“Yes, yes, I know, I was gone for oh-so-long, almost an hour, how dreadful, and a whole ten feet beneath you, at that, such an unbearable distance,” Hamish was saying, voice dripping with a venomously affectionate sarcasm as he was beset by alastora, and Velma smiled down at her Mary Janes as the little demons hopped over his jumper and wrapped themselves around his shoulders, pulling at his hair, stuffing themselves into his pockets and down the front of his shirt collar. The tone of his voice was somewhat contrasted by the gentle way he put out his hands for the alastora to perch on, and the way he stroked their backs, between their wildly flapping wings. Their noise became lower in volume as they calmed down, apparently reassured that Hamish was alive and well, and she could hear him talking absently away to them as he moved around the kitchen.

Velma stayed in place for a moment, slowly closing the landing door behind her. MacKinnon’s flat, to her surprise, was not sparsely appointed, with sleek, bright colours like his shop was. It was dark, cosy, and infinitely more comfortable, with dark floral wallpaper on the walls, and an emphasis on dark, luscious red fabrics. The sofas and armchairs were overstuffed and comfortable, each with tartan blankets casually thrown over their backs, and a fireplace roared cheerfully from beneath a dark slate mantel: the lamplight was shaded in golds and rose pinks, and made the whole room feel that much warmer.

There was a safety cage around the old-fashioned, big fireplace, with a few radiator cat beds hanging from it, and when she took a step forward, craning her neck, she could see three alastora were still sleepily curled up in one of them, wrapped around one another and yawning softly as they crammed themselves as close as they could to the fire.

“Do they hurt themselves, if you don’t have a cage on the fire?” Velma asked as she came toward the kitchen, watching Hamish pour out two cups of tea, even as he tossed alastora, one by one, into the sink, peeling them out of where they’d tangled themselves in his cardigan.

“Oh, no, they don’t _hurt_ themselves,” Hamish said. “Sorry wee idiots _do_ get covered in coal dust, ash, and smut, and trek it all about the house.”

Velma laughed, and Hamish let out a low, exhaled noise through his nose that might have been a laugh, if you were willing to be very generous about the definition.

“You really don’t have to feed me, Mr MacKinnon,” Velma said as Hamish handed her a mug of steaming tea, black, and MacKinnon let out a scornful noise, picking up the rest of the kettle. As she watched, he poured the steaming-hot water into the sink, and the alastora laughed and scrabbled on the metal surface, falling over one another and wrestling to be under the spray.

“There’s stew in the oven, so I _will_ ,” Hamish said firmly, without looking at her. His lips shifted infinitesimally up at their edges as he poured boiling water over his demons, and the alastora were… _cute_ about it. They hopped up and down, wetly flapping their wings, and when one jumped out of the water, straight to her, Velma reacted reflexively, catching it out of the air.

It peered up at her, gormless, and she felt how hot it was to the touch, much hotter than the mug of tea held in her other hand. She opened her palm, expecting it to scramble free, but it just sat down against the heel of it, looking up at her with curiosity in its six bright eyes.

“How much did they pay?” Velma asked, putting her mug down on the counter so that she could hold the alastor with both hands, and between her cupped palms, it laid down on its back, yawning exaggeratedly before it curled its wings around its head, forming a leathery little cocoon. It didn’t weigh much – it felt deceptively light for its frame, like every beetle she’d ever held.

“Nine-fifty,” Hamish said darkly.

“So I get four hundred?”

“Three-eighty,” Hamish corrected immediately, giving her a disapproving look, and then he glanced down to the alastor cupped in her hands, his expression softening somewhat. “They do bite, you know,” he said half-heartedly, even as he swilled the scalding hot water in the sink behind him with his fingers, making the alastora crammed into the sink vocalise and fall over one another as they splashed in it.

Some of them had already gotten bored, moving back into the living room, although a few of them had stuffed themselves back into Hamish’s cardigan pockets, piling themselves on top of one another.

“This one’s asleep, I think,” Velma said. “I think it likes me.”

“They aren’t very discerning creatures,” Hamish said, and Velma felt her mouth drop open, but he didn’t stick around to rub salt in the new wound, moving back toward the oven and crouching down to open it up. It was a dark green pot, the sort of one you could use for the stove and the oven, and whatever stew it was, it smelled _incredible_.

“Slice some bread from the loaf in the box,” Hamish said, nodding to the bread board toward the edge of the kitchen, and Velma awkwardly set the alastor down next to her mug, where it immediately crammed itself against the mug’s side, giving her a mournful look, as though accusing her of leaving it to freeze to death.

“I’d wash my hands,” she said, “but washing them in alastor water doesn’t seem like it’d make much difference.”

She aimed this comment more at the alastora themselves than at Hamish, and the demons looked up at her blankly, glancing between her and Hamish, who was either ignoring her, or hadn’t heard.

It was a heavy, brown bread, made with nuts and grains, and it felt very fresh under her hands. She put a small piece in her mouth, chewing thoughtfully – she didn’t normally like brown bread, but this was good, moist and rich, and she swallowed, amazed at the taste of it.

“Where do you _get_ this stuff?”

“I make it,” Hamish answered primly as he ladled stew into two bowls. “Two loaves a week usually suffice between us. Butter is in the cold cabinet.”

“You mean the fridge?” Velma asked, moving toward where Hamish was pointing, and then clasping the right cupboard door when he nodded his head in confirmation, tugging it toward her. “Oh,” she said, tracing her fingers over the complicated, swirling symbols carved around the inside of the door, and feeling the cold that radiated from it. It felt more natural, somehow, than standing in the cold of a fridge – it almost smelled like morning dew, or like a wet, cold sunrise, and she reached for the butter dish. Of _course_ he had a butter dish. Holding it in her hand, feeling the additional cold that radiated from it, she looked between the symbols neatly marked on the butter dish’s lid, and the ones on the cupboard. “These aren’t Cymru style, are they?”

“They’re fae enchantments,” Hamish said, tone on a strange knife-edge between casual and defensive. “The fae modes are very different to human ones, this one particularly.”

Velma turned back to look at Hamish for a moment, taking in his red cheeks, his relatively pale skin, his thinning, yellow hair. Hamish met her gaze, and didn’t break it, raising his chin slightly and looking at her very seriously.

“What?” he asked.

“You don’t look very fae, that’s all,” Velma said.

“I suppose I don’t, as you would know it,” Hamish said, turning back to the bowls as he moved out of the kitchen, leading the way to a modest dining table against one edge of the wall. It would have sat four, but only had two dining chairs either side, and Velma set the butter dish and the chopping board with the bread on it against one side. There was a tablecloth on the table already, as well as place settings with leather mats, forks, knives, spoons. They were all polished to a shine, and Velma looked down at them, thoughtfully. “The truth about being fae, dear girl, is that it’s not about blood, not in the way being human is. It’s about the magic one uses, the world one learns magic in, where one comes to adulthood…”

“Is that what the girl, Annabella, meant earlier? She said two years.”

“That will have been a serving sentence, I expect, working in a fae establishment, on a farm or in some sort of workshop. They’re all about that sort of thing in Ciarraí,” Hamish said, reaching for a piece of bread and beginning to butter it liberally. Velma expected the alastora to flock around, maybe to beg for food, but they were all piled up beside the fireplace, now, sleeping together in a ball of leathery bug-demon. “Knowing what a fairy tree was and being of Irish blood will have been enough for them, from their legal perspective, to classify her as ready for a fair trial, you know. Two years in this dimension – in the fae realm, I would guess sixty years, perhaps more. She’ll have learned magic, of course, will have learned skills, but…”

Hamish went quiet, focusing on his bread, and Velma hesitated before picking up a fork, speaking a piece of thick, juicy pork and bringing it up to her mouth. It was good, salty and beautifully spiced, and she focused on eating for a few minutes, the silence… awkward.

“Is that what happened to you?” Velma asked.

“Is what what happened to me?”

“Did you get convicted of a fae crime?”

Hamish sighed, looking at her exasperatedly, and then said, “You know, for most fae, the concept of _crime_ is… Let us say, quite removed from the human understanding of it. In any case, things were very different when I was a boy, without all these protections for humans and such forth – in Cymru-Loegr, of course, these matters are very different indeed, what with the affect the king regent tends to take to such things.”

The silence, this time, was _very_ awkward, as Velma kept silent, and Hamish looked at her expectantly, then narrowed his eyes when it became clear to him she didn’t really know what he was talking about.

“I don’t really follow politics,” Velma said, slowly.

“My dear girl, Myrddin Wyllt took the regency in 1656. It isn’t exactly a recent development.”

“I wasn’t born yet.”

“That’s not the excuse you think it is.”

“Well, where were _you_ in 1656?”

“I was in Losga, which is a fae kingdom at the base of Ben Nevis. In human terms, I was around thirteen years old, but I’d already been amongst fae for some decades. Fae often stole children that took their fancy, in those days.”

“They kidnapped you, and now you’re all pro-fae?”

“I’m anti-human,” Hamish said casually. “The two standpoints are not quite the same.”

“I’m human,” Velma said.

“It’s one of your more minor flaws, I’m sure,” Hamish replied, without missing a beat. “Eat.”

“How long have you known my aunt?” Velma asked, after a few minutes of eating in silence. She looked past Hamish to the alastora, still piled neatly on top of one another, sleeping soundly in their little stack, and Hamish hummed at the question, considering it.

“I met Ginchiyo when she was…” He stared into the middle distance, his blue eyes narrowing slightly behind the glass of his spectacles, and then he gave a slow nod of his head. “She had just turned twenty-one, I believe. Those were rather different times in this business, the sixties and seventies – it wasn’t that there was no regulation at all, but the way in which those regulations were kept and enforced, it was far laxer. The digital age has done much for the magical community, as much as it has the mundane one, you know – the two communities inspire one another, and influence one another in their way.”

“You know that job with the sticky imps the last week there? She said that back in the eighties she’d have gotten a lot more money out of the same colony, because she’d just have let it go between different houses in the same town, then have a town meeting.”

Hamish chuckled. “Your aunt is a liar,” he said mildly.

“Excuse me?”

“Ginchiyo would never,” the old man murmured, his lips curved into what looked like a genuinely fond smile. “Some of her competitors, certainly, employed such practices, but not her. Back when she and Kimi worked together, the two of them often quarrelled about things like that – Kimi was always somewhat more concerned with their bottom line, being the accountant between them, and the worst the atermorpha would do was cosmetic damage, you know, it wasn’t as though they could harm anybody. But Ginchiyo was ever so concerned with how the imps might be hurt, let to bounce around like that.”

Velma was quiet, focusing on her meal. She was aware of the tension in her shoulders, the stiffness in her back.

“I don’t mean to speak ill of her,” Hamish said. “Merely that I think Ginchiyo rather likes to appear more the careless rock star than she really is. She’s a very caring woman.”

“Mmm,” Velma agreed. “She is.”

“And Kimi—”

“You know we don’t talk to Kimi anymore, right?” Velma broke in, raising her eyebrows, and Hamish raised his own, looking back at her. “None of us, not even Ginchiyo?”

“I… did not,” he said delicately, and looked as though he were about to say more, but instead just inclined his head, waving one of his plump hands. To his credit, he seemed genuinely disarmed, and regretful for bringing it up. “In any case, Ms Kuroda, I have no doubt that you would be more than capable of following in your aunt’s footsteps, if it suited you.”

“High praise,” Velma said. “Even though I’m no good at classification?”

“These things come with time,” Hamish allowed. “It’s your personality that needs the most refinement.”

Velma let out a huff of surprised laugh, and said flatly, “Thanks.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

“Why are you like this?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re just such a _twat_.”

“I do not suffer fools, Ms Kuroda.”

“Am I a fool?”

“You’re sitting at my dinner table, dear girl, for a meal I invited you for. What do you think?”

“I think you’re a very _strange_ old man.”

“That’s a fair criticism,” Hamish said, standing to his feet. “Wine?”

“No, thank you.”

“Because you’re driving.”

“I just don’t like it.”

Here, Hamish gave her a disapproving look, but said no more about it, disappearing around the corner before returning with a bottle of red wine, pouring out a glass. Stirring in their places, Velma could see a few of the alastora look up curiously to see what Hamish was doing, but none of them moved, staying in their messy little pile.

“Ginchiyo didn’t start out in antiques, of course,” Hamish said. “She was an enforcer, in her early days. She only really focused on antiques and enchantment when she was, oh, I don’t know, twenty-five, twenty-six? She told me her father, Fuyuki, was a carpenter back in Kobe.”

“That’s right,” Velma said. “But not of furniture – he worked on shrines. But when they’d repair roofs, she, Kimi, and my grandfather, they saw a lot of antiques, stuff kept in the temples, and learned a bit about it as they went.”

Hamish nodded his head. “Well, in any case, she was an enforcer first – at your age.”

“I never knew that,” Velma said. “An enforcer, what is that, like a bodyguard?”

“Sometimes,” Hamish said, setting the bottle down and sinking into his seat again. “She would accompany individuals as an armed escort, or a guard – protection work, you know. She wasn’t quite as formidable at that time as she is today. Perfectly capable with her fists at the time, with enough magic to throw behind it, but nowadays she’s more of a warrior mage in the case of a skirmish. I believe the company she was with became tailored increasingly toward working with bailiffs and so on, and that put her off immensely.”

“What sort of skirmishes?” Velma asked. “Are you telling me my aunt gets into fights?”

“Oh, I’m certain I said nothing of the sort,” Hamish said immediately, taking a sip of his wine. “But it must be said that the woman protects what’s hers.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Not like she does.”

Velma laughed, and Hamish smiled slightly, setting his glass down.

“You really are set on this path to curation?” he asked quietly. It wasn’t said with superiority, or said like it was meant to needle, this time. He sounded like he genuinely wanted to know, and Velma inhaled, leaning back in her seat.

“It’s not easy to break into, if you’re not already some posh Oxford lad,” Velma said. “Think it’d be pure waste if I wanted to do it all this time, put in all this work, and then decided to go into the family business.”

“There is the magical side of art curation,” Hamish offered.

“What, dealing in haunted Mona Lisas? Work alongside fae princes instead of human sons of lords?”

“They are much of a muchness in that sense, yes,” Hamish allowed.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you always buy and sell antiques?”

Hamish stared at her for a long moment, like the question itself was a surprise, like he wasn’t used to being asked about himself – maybe he wasn’t. In his flat, she hadn’t seen photographs of any friends or family, and there was no hint of any of that downstairs, either.

“No,” he said. “No, when I first went into business, I owned a small shop in London, and primarily focused on enchantment and restoration. I did quite well at it, but at the turn of the last century, around about 1908, 1909, there was a workers’ strike at several of the London factories, to protest working and living conditions. The Renfrew Strike. These were mostly demonic workforces, and the backlash that ensued was…”

Hamish trailed off, his expression very serious, and Velma looked at him, watched his face, the distant look in his eyes. He didn’t go back to speaking immediately, but lifted his glass once more to his lips.

“There was a lot of anti-demon sentiment, but also anti-fae sentiment, because the factories in question were mainly fae-owned. This is complicated territory, you see – there are plenty of people who are unsettled by fae, but we do good work, we own a lot of important business, even if our law isn’t palatable to humans. Many a time, though, there’s the unscrupulous dealer who uses the excuse of fae law to get away with the worst things one can imaginable, and this was very much the case here – the conditions those demons were living and working with, they were… In any case, there was a good deal of backlash against both fae business owners and demons in general, and I rather got it from both ends.

“So I moved up here, to Nottingham, and elected not to advertise myself so directly as a fae craftsman, but instead as a salesman. I still primarily do restoration and enchantment, even now, but at the time it was easier to fly under the radar, so to speak, as naught more than a merchant.”

“How long were you there?” Velma asked.

“Forty years, nearly,” Hamish said softly. “I set up shop when I first came to England, rented the flats above… I rather thought I’d be there all my life, but one can never assume these things will be set in stone. And in any case, but for a few minor hiccups in the beginning, I love Nottingham far more than I ever did London. The people here are unbearably English, but not quite so dreadfully southern.”

Velma choked on a mouthful of bread, covering her mouth to keep from spitting it over the table, and Hamish really did smile, this time, if only for a moment. It emphasised the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, making them crinkle.

“Why don’t you live in one of the fae cities, if you prefer fae life to human life?” Velma asked, wiping her mouth. “Are they not interested in antiques?”

“They are,” Hamish allowed. “Although my work isn’t as special amongst other fae – granted, I’m an expert in my field, but one of the thing that sets me apart from most human enchanters is that I use a variety of fae modes as well as human ones, and most of my competitors _are_ human. Amongst other fae, that wouldn’t be unique at all – in fact, I’d probably be best off advertising my ability in the Cymru mode, or one of the others more popular amongst humans, to set myself apart. But fae look very poorly upon magical symbiosis – there’s very few protections for the possessed in fae law, and a great distaste for demons in general.”

“Magical symbiosis,” Velma repeated, and when Hamish stood, moving to pick up their empty bowls, she intercepted him, bringing them through to the kitchen to wash up.

“An umbrella term,” Hamish said, setting his glass on the counter and watching as Velma began to wash up the two plates. As soon as she turned the water on the top, a handful of alastora scrambled in from the other room, shoving themselves under the spray and whining pitifully when it was only lukewarm, so she turned it up, until steam came up from the water, and they laughed and giggled under its spray. “Isn’t that too hot for you?”

“No,” Velma said, scrubbing lightly over one of the bowls with a wet sponge, working around the alastora to do so.

“That should be scalding you.”

“I don’t get scalded – my family, on my mother’s side, we’re pyrokinetics. Heat doesn’t do anything to me.”

“Ginchiyo never mentioned it.”

“Why would she? She can’t do it.” She could see the curiosity in his expression, but maybe he thought it was impolite to ask about, because he didn’t say anything more, just giving a prim nod of his head and moving across the room. As she looked back to the sink, she asked, “Can you, um, can you explain magical symbiosis to me? Is that rude?”

“No, no, not at all,” Hamish said. “Magical symbiosis, in broad terms, refers to any two or more individual beings who are, in some way, magically tethered to one another in such a way that if one party is harmed or killed, it will significantly, especially life-threateningly, affect the other party or parties. Now, that could be applied, as a term, to say, a pair of magic-users bonded to one another, or something similar, but ordinarily, we expect it to be between different species.

“Across Cymru-Loegr, there’s a legal distinction between what is considered a symbiotic relationship and what is considered a possession. The specifics are rather buried in legalese, but the distinction is mainly in the extent to which the “dominant” individual—” here, Hamish moved his fingers to make airquotes, and Velma pressed her lips together to keep from laughing, “is in command of his symbiote, and the extent to which the symbiote is beholden to him. If the individual _cannot_ control his symbiote or symbiotes, he is considered _possessed_.”

Hamish’s kitchen had two sinks that shared one tap, and siding to it, and she glanced around for a tea towel, but couldn’t see one. “Where can I dry these? Do you not have a drying rack?”

“Open the cupboard above the sink,” Hamish said, and Velma glanced back at him, but then pulled open the cupboard, and felt herself smile. The drying rack was mounted between the wood framing of the cupboards either side, but rather than a wooden floor, it had a muslin bottom, to let air flow through. Setting the two dishes on the rack, and their forks in the tub, she closed it. “It means the alastora don’t shatter anything.”

“Right,” she said. “Um, sorry, what’s… Why does it matter if someone is symbiotic versus possessed?”

“It affects a few elements. Broadly, it affects the rights of a possessed individual – it’s legal to discriminate, to a certain extent, against someone who is possessed when it comes to job or rental applications, for example, because they are considered a liability, owing to their lack of control over an extension of themselves.

“Police forces are permitted more force, when apprehending those who are possessed – they are permitted to use certain chemical and magical methods to subdue their subject with very little provocation, whereas symbiotics retain more of their right to be arrested without being drugged to the gills and bound in a magical straitjacket.”

“What the _fuck_?”

“Mmm,” Hamish said, draining the last of his wine. “I know.”

One of the alastora let out a plaintive chitter of sound, sitting on the very edge of the sink’s counter, staring up at her with its four arms outstretched, its little hands grabbing at the air. She hesitated for a second, not quite sure how to respond, but then she put out her hand, and the alastora fell forward into her palm, sprawling on its belly with its face mashed against her skin, its wings loosely wrapping around itself.

“That’s… actually very cute,” she murmured, bringing it up to her chest, and the alastora actually fucking _yawned_ , showing all its little teeth as it curled up against her. “Aren’t these guys meant to be more… you know, feral?”

“Rather,” Hamish murmured. “Their scientific name is _alastor domesticus,_ but that’s really a demonologist’s in-joke more than anything else – of the species of alastora, these are the most aggressive, and often the most dangerous to humans. These are highly-evolved predators, you understand – in the infernal dimensions, while not at the apex of their food chain, they are certainly far more predator than prey.”

As he spoke, he absently scooped one of the sleeping alastora out of his cardigan pocket, rubbing his thumb idly over its chin: it chittered softly, curling up in his hand, and he sighed. “We’ve reached an understanding, I suppose – when first I was faced with them, they were frenzied, frightening things. In time, with exposure to one another, I suppose they’ve mellowed, and I… Well. They’re still rather fiercely behaved outside of this flat, I’m afraid.”

“You can’t train them?”

“Training demons isn’t the easy work a dog trainer might have you believe,” Hamish murmured, and dropped the alastor in his hand back into his pocket. “When will you be free to drive down to Falmouth?”

“Uh, in a few days,” she said, pulling out her diary. “You’re sure you don’t want to go yourself? I can drive you, if it’s that.”

“No, no,” Hamish murmured. “I trust your judgement.”

“ _Do_ you? Didn’t get that impression before.”

“You think I’d have asked your assistance if I didn’t?”

“Is this a fae thing? The… you know, the way that you are?”

She expected him to be offended, insulted, but he actually smiled. “We can seem truculent, by human standards.”

“I thought fae were meant to be— you know, _charming_.”

“Charm is for those we’re trying to best in conversation, for conversational opponents – for customers, for rivals, for strangers. You are, at this point, none of the three: we’re equals, you and I. I don’t need to charm you any more than I wish to deceive you – I can be direct, I hope.”

Hamish had said it very casually, very evenly, but Velma couldn’t help feeling stunned, her pen hovering over the blank pages in her diary. After a moment of this, Hamish looked at her askance, seeming surprised at her silence.

“Ms Kuroda?”

“Velma,” she said, after a second. “Velma’s okay. Hamish.”

“Velma, then,” Hamish murmured, and handed over the keys.


	6. Chapter 6

The drive down to Falmouth was a long one.

She’d packed an overnight bag fit for three days, wanting to ensure she was allowing for the maximum she could expect, and then if she really had to stay for any longer, she could just pick up some of the essentials in town.

Hamish hadn’t really had any idea what would be in the storage locker, and had said as much when she’d asked – an old friend, another antiques dealer he’d used to work with when she needed restorations done, hadn’t had any family left, and had left a lot of her stock to be passed onto Hamish.

“Who was she? Your friend?”

“Well, her name was Annabelle Carr,” Hamish said – his voice sounded slightly distant over the phone, because he had her on loudspeaker, and now and then, she could hear the thin, grinding sound of tools on wood as he worked in his workshop. “I can’t say I knew her very intimately – she was a kind woman, but the sort that was often a little bit too leery of conflict, wanted too much to please everybody. I can’t tell you how many times she rushed something into me for restoration of some minor aesthetic detail in an object that she wanted repaired out of her own pocket, because she wanted the person buying it to be entirely pleased with it.”

The old man’s voice was thoughtful, pensive in the way that old people got, sometimes, talking about people that had died, and Velma wondered if she should really feel bad about asking, but he had _said_ they hadn’t been close.

“Hmm, in any case, it was a friend of hers that sort of sorted out all her storage lockers and stocks, and passed all of them onto me – she thought I’d do the best with them, you know, and she didn’t want to risk passing them onto anyone mundane. Annabelle was a very organised woman, kept everything neatly labelled, keys, documentation, that sort of thing. Everything in Nottingham, London, all of that I could manage with, but I’m afraid I don’t know anyone well in Falmouth.”

“She didn’t live in Cornwall then?”

“No, no, not at all – she lived in Nottingham, out toward Sherwood Forest. I don’t recall her ever mentioning work in Falmouth, truth be told.”

“So I should expect furniture, enchanted objects?”

“I expect so. She didn’t deal in cursed objects, and never kept hold of them, so there oughtn’t be anything along those lines.”

“No other lines of business?”

“Not that I know of,” said Hamish. “She gave a lot to charity – she grew up in a children’s home in Carmarthen, so she donated quite a lot to different orphanages and children’s societies in Cymru-Loegr, to the different protection societies for demons, magical species, and so on.”

“Okay,” Velma murmured. “Well, I’ll keep on for the drive, head straight in, and then I’ll let you know what I find when I get there.”

“Thank you, dear girl,” Hamish said softly: he was closer to the phone, now, had it held to his face, judging by the change in sound. “See you.”

“See you,” Velma echoed, and flicked the radio on as she settled in for the drive.

*** * ***

“Hi, I’m here to look at this locker,” Velma said, putting the receipt for the locker – which had been paid three years in advance, which seemed excessive to her, to say the least – on the desk, and then holding out the keycard for access to the storage facility. “I’m afraid Miss Carr died last year, and I’m checking out the locker for its contents. Here’s the letter from the new owner with his permission, and the proof of death.”

“Lot of papers,” said the receptionist, who was a dark-haired woman, pale but handsome, and Velma grinned, shrugging her shoulders. “Would’ve just pointed you in the right direction anyway, you know. This is… R11, so you’re going to be going down _that_ corridor, turning right when you reach the elevator.”

“Got it, thanks,” Velma said. “Don’t suppose you have any notes on what’s in it?”

“Uh, let me see… No insurance, which means the contents would have been worth less than a thousand pound altogether, or at least, she would have signed a bit of paper saying that. It’s a contained unit, ten by thirty, with its own roof, so it’s not got an open ceiling like a lot of our units do. That’s all I got.”

“Thanks anyway,” Velma murmured, glancing down at the name badge pinned to her polo shirt. “Chloe.”

Chloe gave her a grin, and Velma shifted her grip on her briefcase as she moved toward the corridor, maybe putting a little more of a swing to her hips than she needed to.

She hated storage units. Walking down the long corridors of identical, red metal doors and long-spanning halls of more and more of them spanning off in every direction, especially under the brightness of the overhead fluorescent lighting, it made her feel a little dizzy, and she couldn’t help but think that if you were going to make a modern labyrinth, a place like this would be perfect.

A lot of the smaller lockers had hinge doors that would swing outward, but R11 had a roll-top door, and she put her case aside as she knelt down to unlock the three padlocks keeping it closed. She could feel the slight thrill of enchantment writ into the metal as she touched each of them – basic stuff to ward off tampering and rust, and to dissuade mundies from touching them.

It was a mundane storage unit, but that wasn’t so surprising – she did know of a few magical storage units, but she’d never been in one, because they were always for ridiculously huge spaces, often for storing vehicles or the like. Magical storage units tended to rely on different kinds of expansion charms, which magically expanded a space to make it bigger on the inside – really, what you were doing was creating an additional pocket dimension to hold it all, and the magic that went into it took _years_ of study. You had to know how to do complex warding, which was a study-intensive branch of enchantment, and you also had to know how to weave spell work through it.

Ginchiyo had once described expansion work as trying to balance a pile of rocks in the eye of a tornado.

Suffice it to say, magical storage units were _expensive_ , and mundane ones were cheap.

Taking a loose hold of the door’s handle, she pulled it up with her as she stood, drawing it up to slightly over her head before letting it go, and then she stood stock still, and stared.

The inside of R11 was… _green_. Not just green, in fact – verdant, one could even say. Thick, viridian moss grew up the walls, and thick grass and flowers carpeted its floor, stopping two inches short of the door and leaving a strange, noticeable border of white where the original laminate floor of the locker could still be made out.

Trees, _thick_ trees, grew up toward the ceiling – the locker was 10 by 30 by 30, so the ceiling was _high_ – and spread outward until they touched one another or brushed against the locker’s walls, and some of them had ivy or mushrooms growing up their length. From the locker’s ceiling shone some kind of artificial sun, and inside the locker, it was humid, but not that much warmer than it had been out in the corridor – though when she stood under the fake sun’s light, she felt its warmth on her skin.

“Right,” she murmured to herself, stepping slowly inside, and she scanned the floor for any sign of fungus lines or mushroom rings, any uncanny border she shouldn’t be crossing, but she didn’t see one as she moved further in, touching the bark of an oak tree to assure herself it was real, and it was, although the bark was sticky with sap under her touch. Dragging back her hand and wiping it off on some bushes, she looked at the sap where it was dripping out from some bored holes in the tree’s surface.

Then, with a harsh, caterwauling screech, the thing that lived in R11 barrelled into her.

“Fuck,” Velma hissed as the wind was knocked out of her, thrown back onto her shoulders in the grass, and she barely got a glimpse of the thing, as big as a Labrador with a face like a wooden wildcat, two front teeth protruding from its mouth like a sabretooth’s, before it launched itself off her chest again. Groaning, she touched where its claws had dug into her chest, tearing the wool and drawing blood, and she moved quickly back on her elbows, not getting up as she tried to keep her eyes on it.

It moved _fast_ , a streak of glossy black bouncing off the walls and ceilings, but it was cat-like in its make-up – it had four paws and a tail, and although its head was big and strangely square, with hard angles and folded back ears that made it look like it had made by an origami enthusiast, it had a feline face, as well: big yellow eyes – four of them, not two, but there were all sorts of cat breeds these days – and a cat’s nose and jaw except for the protuberant teeth and thick, white whiskers.

It kept letting out that horrible noise, a heavy growl deep in its throat as it bounced off of walls and tree trunks, and as it launched itself at her again, she rolled back over the border between the locker’s door and the corridor outside: it hit the empty air like it was hitting a glass wall, but it could obviously still see her, because it looked fucking _furious_.

Pacing up and down the edge of the locker, a jaguar in its cage, Velma could see it properly, now, could see the wings that sprouted from its back, grey-feathered things that couldn’t possibly let it fly, given how heavy it was and how they could only span a foot on each side, but probably let it glide or something, in a forested environment.

“Christ,” she muttered, and as she leaned back against the wall, she picked her phone out of her pocket, dialling Hamish’s number as she tried to look at the wounds on her chest. The claws hadn’t dug in too deeply, thankfully, and they’d not torn at anything that much more important than her jumper – already, the blood was flowing a little less deeply on most of them, so she didn’t think she’d need stitches, but antiseptic was absolutely in order.

“Hamish,” Velma said, “was your friend Annabelle, by any chance, _insane_?”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. One sec, I’ll send you a picture.”

She snapped a few of them as best she could, blurry because of how fast the thing paced, and she put the old man on loudspeaker as she rifled through her case for her first aid kit, dragging her jumper over her head and pulling the torn edges of her vest down so that she could rub an antiseptic wipe over her new wounds.

“Ah,” said Hamish.

“Ah is _not_ what I like to hear.”

“Panthera Omnipteryx. A winged cat of infernal origin native to the magical forests of the northern hemisphere.”

“Okay,” Velma said. “And is there any reason your friend would have this infernal winged cat in a storage locker?”

“I really don’t know. It looks well-fed.”

“Not encouraging.”

“Can it get out?”

“I hope not.”

“Are you alright?”

“I have ten new holes in my chest,” Velma said, “but they’re not that deep, and at least it didn’t try to bite me. What do they eat?”

“Well, they’re omnivorous – they’ve been known to eat insects, small birds, mushrooms, but those are all just additives to their diet. They mainly subsist on tree sap.”

“Right,” Velma muttered. “Do you have a number for the local DPS?”

“There are no demonic protection societies in the Kingdom of Cernyw,” Hamish reminded her, and Velma groaned, pressing a little more gauze against her chest before taping it in place. “You might try the Magical Species Society, but winged cats aren’t native to the forests of Cernyw, so I’m really not sure what they’ll do with it – they’re ordinarily found in the northernmost reaches of Loegr, and then across Alba. Cernyw is rather too temperate for them. Is it really the only thing in the locker?”

“I’m not actually sure,” Velma said. “I haven’t looked through it properly yet.”

“Why ever not?”

“Why ev— I’m hanging up now, Hamish. I’ll call you later.”

Sighing as she pulled her ruined jumper back over her head, Velma leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and stared the cat down. It was sat back on its haunches now, its head held high, and it looked at her with its four unblinking eyes.

“Fuck,” Velma said.

The winged cat softly growled.

*** * ***

“Hi, yeah, um, I just wanted to ask what you guys would be able to do about a winged cat?”

“Scottish?”

“I am, yeah.”

“… The cat.”

“Right,” Velma said, bashing her forehead against the wall with a quiet _thunk_. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Well, Scottish winged cats aren’t native to Cernyw.”

“Right in the name, isn’t it?”

“They’re an invasive species, Ma’am. We’d have it brought out to one of our facilities and humanely put down.”

Velma sighed, leaning her head against the wall as she looked into the storage locker, at the frankly stupid-looking animal that now had its four paws buried in the wood of the oak tree, and was gnawing at the wood, its yellow tongue greedily lapping up the sap that oozed forth.

“I was really afraid you’d say that,” she muttered, and pulled the storage locker door closed. “Thanks anyway.”

*** * ***

She had to push down the seats in the back of the car to make space for it, but she managed to get a reinforced carrier intended for large dogs from the pet shop, and then went into an enchanter’s off of the main street to get it _actually_ reinforced. It was only simple work, nothing complicated, but anything that could keep in hell hounds – which were a mixed breed between mundane dogs and infernal wolves, for some reason a very popular pet even in Cernyw – should be able to keep in a winged cat.

She hoped so, anyway.

“Omnivorous?”

“That isn’t a traditional beginning to a phone call, you know,” said Hamish.

“What do they like most?”

“I couldn’t say, I’ve never conducted a survey.”

“I’m in a butcher shop, Hamish, just tell me what to buy that this cat would be pleased to eat.”

“Something pungent, I expect. Liver, perhaps. Why—”

Velma hung up the phone, and said to the butcher, who was looking at her bemusedly, “I need to get a cat into a carrier. Your stinkiest meat, please.”

“Gotcha,” he said cheerfully.

The calves’ liver smelt _disgusting._

But—

Well.

It was worth a try.

**Author's Note:**

> The plan with this work, as I did with [Heart of Stone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25135384), is to publish chapter by chapter and then publish as an eBook for sale!
> 
> I'd love some feedback on my original work if you're keeping up with it, and there's [a little Google form here](https://forms.gle/LdUkXFkrTs6YFxxKA). 
> 
> Totally check out my [Tumblr](https://johannesevans.tumblr.com/), and feel free to join the [Discord](https://discord.gg/vZ27uun) I have for my writing!


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